What the FTSE Women Leaders Review still does not say

The FTSE Women Leaders Review targets 40 percent women on FTSE 350 boards and across the senior leadership of those companies by the end of 2025. That is real progress against where the numbers sat a decade ago, when Lord Davies's review first set 25 percent as the goal and many of us were told it was ambitious.

The headline number is not the part I want to talk about.

The part I want to talk about is the leadership pipeline below the board, where the chart still narrows quickly. The review measures executive committees. It does not yet measure the layer below them, where most board candidates are actually formed. That is the layer I see when I am asked to recommend names. It is not full. It is being slowly filled, mostly by women already inside the firm who waited longer than their male peers to be invited up.

I do not think this is a numbers problem any more. The numbers exist. The problem is now closer to the conversation that happens when a board is putting together a long-list. Two patterns repeat. The first is the assumption that a female non-executive director needs a sector-perfect CV before she is on the page, while a male candidate's adjacent experience is read as breadth. The second is the assumption that one woman on the slate has already solved the question, so the rest of the list can be selected on a different criterion. Both are easy to spot and easy to correct, once a chair is willing to be told.

What I tell women asking how to get to a first board seat is rarely about the seat. It is about the work that becomes visible afterward. Audit committee chairs are made by hours inside the auditor's room, not by titles. Risk committee chairs are made by being the person who reads the appendices. Remuneration is made by being able to hold an awkward line in front of a shareholder who has the chief executive on speed dial. These are skills earned in operating roles, then translated. Boards reward people who arrive already fluent.

The other piece of advice is unfashionable. Sit on a smaller board first. Regulated subsidiaries, private companies, charities with real fiduciary responsibility. These are governance gyms. The cadence of decision-making is closer to what a public board actually demands than most people expect. And the mistakes are easier to learn from when they are not in a half-year results announcement.

The 40 percent target will move. The harder number, the one underneath, is whether the women now sitting on these boards are the same five names that everyone called, or a wider pool that is genuinely getting wider. The review does not track that yet. The work continues.