2026 Female board representation in UK manufacturing
With less than 10 years to reach the UK manufacturing sector’s target of “35 by 35” (where women will make up 35% of the manufacturing workforce by 2035), we renew our analysis of the progress the sector is making towards gender equity in leadership roles.
This year’s analysis of the board make-up of select FTSE 100 Industrials companies shows modest signs of progress. Overall, women now occupy 46% of total board seats, representing an uptick from our previous years, where women represented c. 40% of total seats in both 2023 and 2022. The majority of these seats remain skewed towards non-executive director roles with 33% of these held by women.
There was a similar uplift among the ‘big 3’ of board seats of Chair, CEO and CFO, although women continue to be a significant minority. Of the total 75 of these spaces available, only 17 are held by women, equivalent to 23%. This is a slight increase from our last analysis in 2023, where 12 out of 75 of these roles were held by women (16%), and the year before where women represented 15% of those roles.
Progress is mixed with a greater share of women occupying CFO positions but far fewer holding the position of Chief Executive. Only Taylor Wimpey and BP had female chief executives. This is equivalent to our last analysis in 2023, where again only 2 of the companies analysed had female CEOs, Taylor Wimpey and GSK.
The CFO position has slightly stronger representation with 8 of the total 25 companies (32%) having female CFOs (AstraZeneca, GSK, Haleon, BP, Convatec, Halma, Rolls Royce, and Spirax Sarco). The share of women CFOs has doubled since our last analysis, where only 4 of the 25 CFOs were female (16%).
Although this dataset is small (a total 75 board seats analysed across 25 companies), it does indicate that some progress is being made in female representation across company boards. If the industry wants to continue to make progress in increasing representation of women in leadership roles, particular focus should be on the CEO position, which has remained flat and is lagging behind progress in other areas.
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