New Financial published its latest report measuring female representation on boards and executive committees at more than 200 companies and institutions across the European capital markets.
With so much focus on gender diversity on the boards of big listed companies, New Financial wanted to drill down into diversity across the financial markets by comparing 11 different sectors of the capital markets including banks, asset managers, hedge funds, investment banks, trade bodies, regulators and pension funds.
While the data shows that average women are under-represented at the highest levels of decision-making in the industry, the good news is there are signs of improvement since the same data was collected a year ago.
The highlights of the report are:
1. Nearly a quarter (23%) of board directors at companies and institutions in European capital markets are women and one in six (16%) executive committee members are female.
2. While the numbers are low, they are moving in the right direction. Nearly half (47%) of boards in our sample have increased female representation year-on-year as have a third (34%) of excos.
3. There is a big difference in levels of gender diversity between boards and executive committees (for example, at banks, average female representation on boards at 32% is nearly triple the levels on executive committees at just 12%).
4. The 23% figure for female representation on boards disguises the under-representation of women in executive directorships. The proportion of female non-executives (24%) is nearly twice that of female executive directors (13%).
5. Where women do sit on executive committees, they tend to be in support roles rather than “profit and loss” functions. We found nearly two thirds of heads of comms (64%) and more than half of heads of HR (58%) on excos were women, but only 12% of heads of a division or region are female, and just 11% of the C-suite.
6. There is a wide range of gender diversity across different sectors in our sample (for example, average female representation on executive committees is lowest at 7% for private equity, rising to 30% for trade bodies).
7. If the capital markets industry set a voluntary target of 33% female representation on boards (like the Davies Review’s recommendation of 33% by 2020) it would take on average six years to achieve it, and if the industry chose a target of 25% for excos, it would take just over 10 years to achieve it (based on 2015 numbers of net new women appointed).
8. The percentage of companies with no women on their executive committees has fallen from 23% a year ago to 19%, but the most common figure for the percentage of women on executive committees is still zero.
You can read the report here.