Women now make up 40% of boardroom positions at the UK’s 350 most valuable publicly listed companies.
A report by the FTSE Women Leaders Review, a government backed campaign to increase the number of women in executive roles, showed 40.2% of FTSE 350 board roles are now held by women.
The group set a target of 40% by the end of 2025, but it has been reached three years early.
The vast majority – 319 of the 350 companies – have met or exceeded the target.
The numbers are a substantial increase. Eleven years ago just 9.5% of FTSE 350 board positions were held by women and just over a decade ago, 152 of the boards had no women on them at all.
Progress was seen across boardroom posts too. The number of women in the chair role increased to 55 across the FTSE 350 firms, up from 48 in 2021. Similarly, the number of women senior independent directors has risen to 130, up from 115 in 2021.
Women hold a third of all leadership roles in FTSE 350 companies, the report said.
There has also been a big jump in the number of women as financial directors, up from 16% in 2021 to 23% in 2022.
In terms of below board level roles, women make up 33.5% of leadership at FTSE 350 companies and 34% of such positions at private companies that are not listed on a stock exchange.
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It’s the first time the report has extended to 50 of the UK’s largest private companies, tracking progress of women in 30,000 leadership roles.
The report showed 31.8% of board positions were held by women across the top private firms.
Women are now on every board of the FTSE 350 and the vast majority of those companies have three or more women on their board.
But the news is not all good – as chief executives remain overwhelmingly male.
There are only nine FTSE 100 women chief executives.
The report also stressed there is still more work to be done to achieve gender parity, with the proportion of women in leadership positions – defined as the executive committee and those who directly report to the committee – at 33.5% for the FTSE 350.
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Previous analysis of senior leadership in the FTSE 350 showed 96% of CEOs are men.
This is despite the entry level recruitment often being close to 50:50, according to analysis conducted by gender and diversity consultancy firm, The Pipeline.
Its Women Count 2022 report found three-quarters of the members of FTSE 350 executive committees are men, and a quarter are women. There were no women at all on the executive committees of 10% of the companies, the report said.
The board of directors of a company is responsible for the management of the company. Positions on the board include directors, senior executives and chair people.
