Publicly-listed companies should have more women on their executive committees as it helps boost profits, research claimed today.
Executive committees sit underneath the board and run the company, but women hold just 17% of these roles in FTSE-350 companies.
Lorna Fitzsimmons, former Labour MP and a co-founder of The Pipeline which crunched the data, said: “If you have over 25% of women on your executive committee, your profit margins are almost three times higher than firms with all-male executives.”
Fitzsimmons said FTSE-350 firms should aim to have 33% females on executive committees by 2020.
The report also shows that fewer than 4% of the UK’s biggest companies have female chief executives and nine out of 10 have no women executives on their main boards. Fitzsimmons has urged fund managers to only invest in companies which have women in top roles.
She adds: “You have to have hard targets, you have to know where you’re going. At the current pace we will only hit the 33% figure by the turn of the next century. If you have an engaged group of women in your organisation that have career goals and know how to navigate the organisation, you have the perfect recipe.”
