The number of women on boards of the UK’s top 150 companies continues to rise, from 40% to 43% this year, according to the latest research for 2024 from Spencer Stuart.
The executive search and leadership consultancy found that while 53% of all non-executive directors are women, men still dominate the ranks of executive directors (81%).
Two-thirds (67%) of companies reached the 40% target for women on boards, up from 53% in 2023.
Twenty-nine of the 150 boards achieved gender parity, up from 18 in 2023, and 91 boards comprise at least 50% female non-executives as of 30 April 2024.
The FTSE Women Leaders Review and the Financial Conduct Authority proposed new targets in 2022 to advance the number of women on boards. They recommended that by the end of next year, all FTSE 350 companies should have at least one woman among the four most senior board positions of chair, chief executive, chief financial officer and senior independent director.
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According to the 2024 Spencer Stuart Board Index, 71% of the top 150 FTSE companies had at least one woman in one of these four roles, up from 60% in 2023 and 51% in 2022. No board has appointed women to all four of these roles. By contrast, 43 boards had men occupying all four roles.
Four companies – Croda, Diageo, Hargreaves Lansdown and Severn Trent – had three women in these leadership four roles in 2024, and 24 boards had two.
The report said: “Gender balance among the other board roles is still a long way away, albeit moving slowly in the right direction. For example, in each of the past two years, there have been 22 chair appointments.
“This year, six of the new chairs were women, two more than last year, bringing the total number of female chairs in our sample up to 22.
“The number of female chairs has not changed year on year, due to four companies with female chairs dropping out of the top 150 and two women replacing outgoing female chairs. By contrast, the number of female CEOs and CFOs has risen (to 18 and 31, respectively).”
Ethnic diversity on boards
The Parker Review set a target for FTSE 250 boards to have at least one director from a minority ethnic background by December 2024. This followed the December 2021 deadline for FTSE 100 companies. Spencer Stuart found that 11 of the top 150 companies had not yet appointed such a director.
The number of directors from a self-declared minority ethnic background remained static: 12.5% of all directors (186 out of 1,515) had a minority ethnic background, compared with 13% in 2023 and 12% in 2022.
The report found that 58% of minority ethnic directors are non-UK nationals: 26% are US citizens, 12% are Canadian, and 9% are Indian.
Of the 196 new directors appointed in the year to April, only seven were from a minority ethnic background (4%).
However, the report’s authors stressed that providing comprehensive information on the minority ethnic background of directors has become increasingly difficult because not all directors choose to self-identify, reporting is inconsistent and it is increasingly common for companies to report the number of minority ethnic directors on the board as a whole, rather than at the level of individual directors.
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“While this is perfectly understandable, it does mean that our data on the ethnicity minority background of new directors in particular is likely to be incomplete,” they said.
