‘To get more women on boards we must keep those lower down ladder’

The campaign group fighting to get more women on the boards of top British companies today turned its fire on the declining number of women executives lower down the ladder.

The 30 per cent Club is seeking to improve female representation in the “pipeline” of FTSE 100 companies, with a new target of a minimum of 30 per cent women on executive committees of the 100 largest listed firms by 2020.

Female representation at these firms appears to be falling, with a recent study by Cranfield University and Barclays showing the percentage of women had dropped from 18.1 per cent in 2009 to 15.6 per cent in 2014.

“Focusing on the pipeline is the next phase: it’s where women tend to be lost,” said Brenda Trenowden, global chair of the 30 per cent Club and Head of Financial Institutions for Europe at the bank ANZ.

“There’s a lot of myths about women leaving because of children, but women tend to leave because they get frustrated they’re not being promoted.

"They’re banging their head against that glass ceiling, or they look around at their culture and say, ‘This is not a culture I want to play in.’”

Trenowden believes 30 per cent is a tipping point: “It’s when you’re not ‘the woman’ in the room — that’s when your voice is heard in its own right.”

The group will also expand its targets to include a further 250 large firms, with a second new target of 30 per cent of women on FTSE 350 boards by 2020.

It comes after the 30 per cent Club came close to meeting its ambitions of having 30 per cent of FTSE 100 boardmembers being female.

Since the group launched in 2010, the number of women on boards has risen from 12.5 per cent to 26 per cent. There is no longer a single all-male board in the FTSE 100.

“[The second target] is about making the gains in the FTSE 100 sustainable,” says Trenowden.

“There is a danger that everyone congratulates each other and says ‘job done, let’s move on’ but as soon as there’s a bit of turnover — and it’s not necessarily true that a woman will be replaced by another woman — that number could fall very quickly.”

There are still only six female CEOs in the FTSE 100: Alison Brittain at Premier Inn and Costa Coffee owner Whitbread, Moya Greene of Royal Mail, Kingfisher’s Veronique Laury, Severn Trent’s Liv Garfield, Alison Cooper at Imperial Tobacco and easyJet’s Carolyn McCall.