A boardroom first: Women outnumber male directors
For the first time ever women make up the majority of independent directors at the largest listed companies but are still outnumbered by men at executive level, according to a new study.
Across the 150 biggest public companies in Britain, 442 women are employed as non-executive directors, just edging out the number of male peers, at 422, according to a report by headhunting company Spencer Stuart.
As a result women account for over a third of all directors with 36 per cent of directors, including chairwomen and executive directors, being female. The figures mark a shift since 2016 when just under a quarter of directors were women, and just 12 per cent in 2011.
Women have overthrown men as the majority among non-executives in the boardroom after a hiring boom earlier in the year in which more than half of newly appointed directors were women. There were 15 boards which also achieved their goal of gender parity, five more than the year before.
But the report acknowledged the “picture is less rosy” when it comes to executive level in boardrooms as the proportion of female executive directors was unchanged from the previous year, at 14 per cent.
Eighteen per cent of newly appointed executive directors were women. Of the nine women appointed to executive roles last year, seven were chief financial officers.
There are only five more female chief executives at the top 150 FSTE companies than there were over a decade ago – totalling 12.
Women, the report said, were still outnumbered by men on executive committees despite a target of 33 per cent women on executive committees by 2020 set by government-backed group Hampton-Alexander review.
The report found that women accounted for 24 per cent of executive committee members instead while almost 10 per cent of committees were all-male.
When it comes to ethnic diversity in boardrooms, the report found plenty of room for improvement. While the proportion of first-time board directors from minority backgrounds rose to 25 per cent in 2021, almost 40 per cent of companies still have no directors from an ethnic minority background.