This blog is no longer updated but it remains open as an archive.
The 'Women at the Top' blog is part of a series of online and print publications that focuses on women's achievements in business. With up-to-date news and incisive analysis, the blog will provoke discussion on the role of the world's most prominent businesswomen. www.ft.com/womenblog
For more Women at the Top news, video interviews and other features, visit www.ft.com/womenatthetop
Liz Bolshaw
Liz Bolshaw is a business journalist and editor. She has been a successful book publisher, online editor, magazine editor and publisher.
She was launch editor of the Europe-wide online community Entrepreneur Country, has published magazines for PwC, 3i, dunhill and Bafta, and launched The Sharp Edge, a magazine for and about entrepreneurs, with Duncan Bannatyne. She is a regular contributor to Thomson Reuters’ Venture Capital Journal.
Her last project for the Financial Times was as editor of the paper’s Business Education magazine.
Rebecca Knight
Rebecca Knight is a freelance journalist based in Boston. She writes regularly for the FT on business education, entrepreneurship, and management.
Andrew Hill
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He was City editor of the FT and editor of the daily Lombard column on British business and finance from September 2006 to December 2010.
He was the FT’s financial editor from June 2005 to September 2006, with overall responsibility for coverage of companies and markets. Before becoming financial editor, he was the FT’s comment & analysis editor, in charge of the paper’s opinion and features pages.
From 1999 to 2003, he was the FT’s New York bureau chief. He joined the FT in 1988 and has also worked as foreign news editor, UK companies reporter and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
Pino Bethencourt
Pino Bethencourt is a professor and leadership expert at IE Business School in Madrid. She is also an author and executive coach.
Lynda Gratton
Lynda Gratton is professor of management practice at London Business School.
Linda Tarr-Whelan
Linda Tarr-Whelan, former ambassador to the UN commission on the status of women, is a Demos distinguished senior fellow.
Catalyst for change
A new study shows that diversity has flatlined in America’s largest companies.
Catalyst, a US-based think-tank, tracks the composition of supervisory boards, executive teams and high earners in Fortune 500 companies to give an annual snapshot of diversity progress in some of the world’s largest and best-known organisations.
Glass ceilings starting to crack across Europe
A recent study by Washington-based Corporate Women Directors International shows the impact of quotas on increasing the diversity of company boards in Europe. (more…)
Women are the key to unlocking Africa’s economic growth, says new report
A new report from Ernst & Young, published this week, brings together a wide range of data and adds new insight into the potential of women in Africa to boost economic growth, increase levels of education and improve standards of governance in public life. (more…)
Shareholder muscle lends its weight to board diversity
It is not the first time that the diversity debate has moved from the executive to the owners of the UK’s largest companies, but this week’s launch of an investor action group adds muscle to that discussion. (more…)
The top 50 women in world business
Irene Rosenfeld rises to head the Financial Times’ list of the top 50 women in world business in a year defined by her decision to split Kraft Foods into two separate entities. (more…)
Lessons from a leadership veteran
Niall FitzGerald, former chief executive of Unilever and chairman of Thomson Reuters, spoke last week at Brandeis University’s International Business School, just outside of Boston, about the qualities of good, strong leaders. (more…)
Boardroom beckons for Norway’s women
Norway has the highest level of participation of women in the boardroom than any other country in the world, having introduced a 40 per cent quota in 2003. (The quota became mandatory in 2008.) (more…)
To an outsider Germany might seem like a place where women could easily fill high-powered positions, writes Rebeka Shaid. After all, the country is governed by chancellor Angela Merkel, who Forbes recently crowned “the world’s most powerful woman”. Yet last year the German Institute for Economic Research found that over 90 per cent of the nation’s top-100 companies did not appoint one single woman to an executive positions. How can this be? (more…)
Even on board diversity, men and women can’t agree
As countries around the world set targets to increase the number of women directors in public companies, new research suggests that meeting those goals might be complicated by the fact that male and female board members do not agree on whether board diversity will improve a board’s performance.
According to the research, women and men on corporate boards disagree on the need for quotas and the reasons why fewer women are represented on boards, and whether or not a diverse board matters for good corporate governance.
Lord Davies and board diversity: what do the figures say?
The deadline laid down by Lord Davies of Abersoch’s panel for FTSE 250 companies to set out targets for achieving greater board diversity has just passed. The press release reporting on what has been achieved skirts round the central question of how many companies have yet to report targets, but it is, unsurprisingly, strong on the progress that has been made. (more…)
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