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Deloitte: Over three quarters of companies actively trying to increase diversity of their board

A new report from Deloitte has shown that while over three quarters of companies actively trying to increase diversity of their board and almost 30% of FTSE 350 non-executive board appointments in the past year were women - more than double the overall proportion of women on boards - still only one in 10 executive board appointments were filled by a woman. Carol Arrowsmith, partner in the executive compensation team at Deloitte, said: “It is extremely encouraging that since Lord Davies published his report on women on boards, almost a third of non-executive appointments in FTSE 350 companies have been women. However, we also need to look hard at the number of female executive appointments. This is where many of the non-executive directors of the future are likely to emerge from and we are still seeing only one in 10 recent executive director appointments filled by a woman. This is an improvement on the overall number of executive positions held by women, which stands at around one in every 20, but it is not enough.”