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The UK’s largest listed companies are set to miss a target to have women in 40 per cent of top executive roles by 2025, according to a government-backed campaign to boost female representation.
The FTSE Women Leaders Review found women made up 35.3 per cent of senior leadership roles — defined as those in the executive committee and senior managers immediately below that level — across the FTSE 350 in 2024, putting businesses on track to miss a 40 per cent target this year.
While the biggest UK companies are “within striking distance” of meeting the goal — having increased female representation in executive ranks from 24.5 per cent in 2017 — the pace of change had “slowed”, the review’s annual report said on Tuesday.
The target “may not be achieved until beyond 2025 as some companies still have less than a third of their leadership roles held by women”, according to the report. The end of this year marks the deadline for the five-year review.
Companies have made better progress on increasing the number of women on boards. The campaign said 43.4 per cent of board roles at FTSE 350 companies were held by women last year, up from 25 per cent in 2015 and just 9.5 per cent in 2011.
The FTSE Women Leaders Review was launched in 2021 as a successor to the Hampton-Alexander and Davies reviews. Alongside increasing targets for boards, it was given an expanded remit to look at senior executive roles.
Women make up 32.7 per cent of FTSE 100 executive committee roles, up from 30.4 per cent in 2023. But almost a third of companies have yet to cross the 33 per cent threshold.
Marks and Spencer was the FTSE 100 company with the highest number of women on its leadership team, followed by education company Pearson and retailer Next.
Meanwhile, mining group Fresnillo and Games Workshop Group, which makes the fantasy game Warhammer, ranked as the groups with the lowest proportion of women in leadership roles.
“There was a push, through many initiatives, to get to this mark, and while the optics look good, there are still some real challenges,” said Pavita Cooper, chair of the 30% Club UK, a campaign led by chairs and chief executives to increase gender diversity at board and senior management levels. “Women are not in the right roles to go on to get the top jobs.”
Cooper added that women in executive committee roles were often running “support” functions such as compliance and human resources rather than having ownership over finances and entire business divisions, leading to a “power gap”.
The report comes as headhunter Russell Reynolds Associates separately published research on Tuesday showing female leaders face “double binds” when they do take the top job — being criticised for being too ambitious or not ambitious enough.
“It really is a glaring double standard,” said Laura Sanderson, co-head of Europe, Middle East and India at Russell Reynolds.
The report, which looked at more than 20,000 news articles covering almost 750 chief executives in FTSE 100, S&P 500 and Euronext 100 companies and includes commentary from analysts, shareholders and policymakers, argues that women are perceived more negatively in the public eye.
“Society often expects women in leadership positions to walk a tightrope between being seen as competent, which requires displaying ambition, and likeable, which often requires downplaying ambition,” said Sanderson.
The Russell Reynolds report found that while women represented just 11 per cent of total chief executive appointments and 6 per cent of CEO departures at the world’s largest listed companies in 2024, they received significantly more media attention.
Women chief executives received 1.25 times more mentions than men and 1.7 times more attention, by number of articles, when they left a role. Around 18 per cent of stories around departures of male CEOs were negative, while for women the figure was 28 per cent.