Women make up only 30% of UK leadership roles. Why is female representation still so low?

Women leaders are still underrepresented compared to men, with women taking only 30% of management roles in the UK. Visibility is just one of the factors curbing women's path to leadership.

For over a decade, the representation of women at senior levels has been on the agenda in the corporate world. Since 2011, the representation of women in leadership at the UK's biggest firms has been tracked, with the Hampton Alexander review setting a target that boards should be at least 33% women by 2020. According to the latest review, female representation on boards reached 39% in FTSE 100 companies, and the voluntary target is now 40% for the top 350 companies by the end of 2025.

Yet progress remains slow. While the proportion of women on boards may have risen, the biggest companies have failed to meet the same target when it comes to executive roles. Across sectors, women remain underrepresented in leadership roles. On average women make up 30% of leadership positions in the UK, according to LinkedIn data. The data indicates progress has been slow but there are signs of potential: the share of women being hired into roles at director level or above has seen incremental improvements in recent years: in 2022, the share of women hired into director level roles or higher stood at 37%, up from 31% in 2015.

The mixed picture

In finance, a sector that has seen significant moves to improve female representation at senior levels, there has been progress: the sector saw one of biggest relative rises in the share of female leaders hired between 2015 and 2021, LinkedIn data shows. In 2021, 32% of hires into leadership roles were women, compared with 26% in 2015. However, while such progress is at least in part due to initiatives such as the government's Women in Finance charter, which commits more than 400 financial services firms to improve the gender balance of senior leadership, the body's annual report last week revealed that female representation plateaued. On average, the review found that the proportion of women in senior leadership at charter signatories remained flat at 33% between 2020 and 2021; though 60% of firms increased their female leadership, a third saw female representation fall. Ambitions are rising, though, with almost half raising their target from 30% senior female representation to at least 40%.

Ann Cairns, executive vice chair of Mastercard, told LinkedIn that though she was pleased there had been some progress on female representation in financial services, there is still "a huge amount of work" needed. "Research by Deloitte shows for every woman added to the C-suite in a financial services organisation, three women rise to senior leadership roles," Cairns said. This "multiplier effect" is "one of the most important reasons why financial services firms should bolster efforts to achieve gender equity," she added.

You can't be what you can't see

The principle of having visible female leaders isn't just important in financial services, or even just at the most senior levels. Though hiring of women into leadership has risen slightly, representation drops off quickly as seniority rises. In the UK, while women make up 45% of senior positions, this starts to falls significantly from mid-management level. At director level, women make up 33% of roles, and at VP level, female representation drops to 23%. In the C-suite, women still make up only a quarter of the most senior positions.

Debbie Wosskow, entrepreneur and co-founder of women's networking organisation AllBright, points to the importance of networks, particularly in the entrepreneurial field that can hold women back from achieving the same success as men.

"Only 7% of venture capital investors are female and 14% of angel investors in the UK are female. And in difficult times, people tend to back what they know. Women need networks. They need coaching. They need mentors, they need champions," Wosskow says.

The importance of simply seeing other women succeed is also significant: LinkedIn research shows 57% of women believe that having a relatable role model is crucial to achieving career success and 70% agree it’s easier to be like someone you can see. Wosskow highlights her own experience as an entrepreneur and business owner: "My mother and grandmother were business owners, and I just grew up with women doing that. So I never questioned whether women could be entrepreneurs." At AllBright, with a majority female workforce, "it's a very different kind of environment," says Wosskow. "You've got two female founders, with five kids between them. If you see women doing it, then you believe it's possible."

Progress impeded by 'promotion bias'

There is also another barrier to women's progression to leadership – internal promotion bias. In the UK, men were 21% more likely than women to be internally promoted to leadership positions in 2021, according to LinkedIn data. "The problem starts at the very first rung of the management ladder – women simply don't get made managers as frequently as men," Mastercard's Cairns says. "In many companies and industries, women are hired or promoted based on their experience while men are often given the chance to step up based on their skills and potential. This continues throughout the leadership pipeline, with fewer and fewer women appearing on shortlists the higher you move up the pipeline."

Cairns points to the importance of data, so companies can spot the obstacles to women's progress and dismantle them. "There's a list of things they can do to unblock the female talent pipeline, from investing in impactful mentoring and sponsorship to carefully considering succession planning." In her own work as a board chair, Cairns had to appoint a new CEO. "I made sure that every long list, every shortlist had a mix of men and women. Through that fair and robust process, the new CEO emerged and yes, it was a woman. She was the best person for the job."

Wosskow is also an advocate for mentoring and upskilling, but also highlights the systemic issues impacting women's career progression. "How to negotiate pay raises and promotions is a learned skill. You can practise and be coached. But there's also structural stuff. We have to face the fact that there's a brain drain out of corporates when women have their children. And that is a point in time when careers tend to accelerate," Wosskow adds.

The UK has some of the highest childcare costs in the OECD and some analysts have warned that the cost and complexity could be contributing to an uptick in the number of women leaving the workforce due to caring responsibilities. There is also parental leave – although government policy allows parents to split their leave, financial incentives are rarely split equally between parents by employers. For Wosskow, equally shared parental leave is something she would like to see, as well as technological solutions to childcare costs. "It's got to start from there, so the raising of children doesn't just sit with women, that the mental load doesn't just sit with women," she says. As an example, Wosskow points to Katie Bickerstaffe, the current co-CEO of Marks & Spencer, "doing a massive job on a four-day week as a mother" and pro-rata earning more than her male co-CEO. "More of that please," she adds.

You can follow some of the Top Voices posting on LinkedIn about diversity, inclusion and some of the issues that impact women in the workplace here.

Methodology

The LinkedIn insights used in this feature are taken from LinkedIn’s Gender Equity in the Workplace report. The internal promotion rate reflects the number of LinkedIn members who added a new leadership position at the same employer to their profile in 2021 divided by the total number of members holding entry, senior IC or manager-level positions during that year. Please see here for the full methodology.