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The largest listed companies in the United Kingdom should miss an objective to have women in 40% of the main management positions by 2025, according to a campaign supported by the government to stimulate female representation.
The FTSE Women Leaders Review revealed that women represented 35.3% of high direction roles – defined as those of the executive committee and senior executives immediately below this level – through the FTSE 350 in 2024, putting the companies on The right track to miss a 40% target this year.
While the biggest British companies Are “at a distance of strike” of the achievement of the objective – having increased female representation in the executive ranks of 24.5% in 2017 – the rate of change had “slowed down”, said the annual report of the ‘exam.
The objective “can only be achieved beyond 2025, because some companies have even 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 Quinquennial examination.
Companies have done Best progress On the increase in the number of women on boards of directors. The campaign indicated that 43.4% of board of directors in FTSE 350 companies were held by women last year, against 25% in 2015 and only 9.5% in 2011.
The magazine Ftse Women Leaders was launched in 2021 as a successor to the Hampton-Alander And Davies Opinion. In addition to the increase in the objectives for the boards of directors, it was given an extended discount to examine the management positions.
Women represent 32.7% of FTSE 100 executive committee roles, compared to 30.4% in 2023. But almost a third of companies have not yet crossed the 33% threshold.
Marks and Spencer was the company FTSE 100 with the greatest number of women in its management team, followed by the educational company Pearson and the retailer.
Meanwhile, the Fresnillo mining group and Games Works Group, which makes the Fantastic game Warhammer, has classified as groups with the lowest proportion of women in leadership roles.
“There has been a push, through numerous initiatives, to reach this brand, and although the optics look good, there are still real challenges,” said Pavita Cooper, president of the 30% Club UK, a campaign led by chairs and a chief leaders to increase the diversity of the sexes at the levels of the board of directors and senior management. “Women are not in the right roles to get the best jobs.”
Cooper added that women in executive committee positions often organize “support” functions such as compliance and human resources rather than having finances and entire commercial divisions, leading to a “gap of power”.
The report occurs while the head hunter Russell Reynolds Associates has published research on Tuesday showing that women leaders are confronted “Double bonds” When they take the first job – criticized to be too ambitious or not ambitious enough.
“It’s really a flagrant double standard,” said Laura Sanderson, co-head of Europe, the Middle East and India at Russell Reynolds.
The report, which examined more than 20,000 press articles covering nearly 750 chief chiefs in FTSE 100, S&P 500 and Euronext 100 companies and includes comments from analysts, shareholders and decision -makers, argues that women are Perceived more negatively in the eyes of the public.
“Society often expects women in management positions to walk on a tightrope between being considered competent, which requires an ambition and an ambition, which often requires an ambition to minimize,” said Sanderson .
The Russell Reynolds report revealed that if women represented only 11% of the total appointment of the Directorate and 6% of the departures of CEOs in the largest companies listed in the world in 2024, they received special attention from media.
The women’s women have received 1.25 times more mentions than men and 1.7 times more attention, by the number of articles, when they left a role. About 18% of stories around the departures of male CEOs were negative, while for women, the figure was 28%.
