The Insight: on women making the difference

We like to be ahead of the curve, so we’re starting the celebrations for International Women’s Day early. Find out how FTSE companies are getting on with gender equality in leadership roles and hear from women making the difference, including the Former Director General of MI5. And we’ve got some predictions ahead of next week’s Budget too.?

Women leaders – it’s time to accelerate progress?

If you’re an avid follower of The Insight, you’ll remember that last month we were talking about the upcoming launch of the latest FTSE Women Leaders Review report. Well, we hosted the launch yesterday at our offices in Canary Wharf, London. One of the Review’s recommendations is to get women into 40% of all leadership positions by the end of 2025. And there was some positive news. Representation of women on FTSE 350 Boards remains ahead of the 40% target and across all leadership roles it was up slightly to 35%. But there needs to be a significant uplift in appointments of women to leadership roles to hit that 40% target in just two years. There’s a particular issue at CEO level.?

Read our FTSE Women Leaders Review report

Women at the top: Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller?

One woman who made it to the top is Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Former Director General of MI5. She joined our Chair Bina Mehta for the latest episode of our Pull up a Chair podcast. What did we learn? Leaders still need the conventional qualities of integrity, objectivity and accountability. But they also now need a focus on sustainability, and diversity and inclusion: “… if you deny yourself talent … by stating, well, I’m going to exclude that section … you don’t deserve to do well in what you're trying to achieve.” Check out the full podcast for more on the changing face of leadership and lessons Eliza learned during her career at MI5.?

Tune into Pull up a Chair with Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller?

Women bring the blue sky thinking to the energy sector?

We agree with Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller – you need to include everyone to drive success. We started running our Women in Energy series of events to make sure women have a voice in the big issues facing this critical sector. To celebrate International Women’s Day, we’ve pulled together an all-female panel for our latest event. We’ll be joined by guests from Google Cloud and SSE, as well as our own experts, to help us do some blue sky thinking about cloud transformation – and plot practical next steps in a cloud strategy.??

Register for the next Women in Energy event

How women at KPMG are making the difference?

We’re strong believers at KPMG that it’s our people who make the difference. One of those people is Freneka Mumford, a Director in our People Consulting team. She explains how she supported a global pharma organisation that was finding it hard to attract and retain people with the specific technical skills it needs. She helped it implement a talent marketplace, which uses AI to identify existing talent in the organisation and match it with projects or gigs. That takes tech. It also requires a culture shift – managers need to be less protective of their resources and be open to sharing skills.??

Watch as Freneka helps implement a talent marketplace?

Here are our Budget predictions?

It’s not just International Women’s Day next week. We’ve also got the small matter of a Budget. So, what will Jeremy Hunt announce? It’s hard to predict – especially in what’s likely to be an election year.

If we’re pushed for an opinion, we think this could be a Budget focussed on growth for SMEs. A cut to the headline rate of corporation tax is unlikely. And we don’t expect significant reform to business rates. But we could see reform of the VAT registration threshold, the VAT Retail Export Scheme reinstated and a stamp duty exemption for smaller businesses.?

There's sure to be one headline-grabbing measure, and that could be a further cut to either income tax or national insurance. Look out for a possible increase to the child benefit threshold too.

It’s not long until we find out what is in the Budget. We’ll be tuned in and providing our usual in-depth analysis of what the measures mean for businesses, employers and individuals.

Follow our Spring Budget 2024 coverage?

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