Charles Woodburn

I think we can all agree that there’s not enough women CEOs or indeed women in senior leadership positions across all companies, ours included, and I think that we have a role to play in changing that. At the end of the day, it’s a very competitive landscape for talent and [we are] making sure that we are properly looking at the 50% of our population that is indeed women, that we are giving them the opportunities to move right up through the organisation to the very top positions.

25x25 is an important opportunity for companies and other organisations to come together and share ideas around what’s working. I certainly think as a company that we have a lot to learn on this and I know that by talking to other organisations that we can share ideas and hopefully we all benefit from this together.

In terms of opening up the pathways, I think one of the things that we have done is set ourselves some targets because I know as a business that we all rally behind targets and I’m always realistic enough around the fact that we recruit an awful lot of STEM graduates and within that population there is a disproportionately smaller number of women sadly and I think that we have a role to play in trying to promote STEM subjects right down at school age.

And in fact, we do a lot of that often with the Armed Forces, so we’ve had some success on there, but I think we all have to do a better job of encouraging women to pick those subjects early.

We’re also evolving our attraction and recruitment process so we’re appealing to the widest talent pool and I’m delighted to say that we’ve been voted by Female Engineering Job Hunters as the number one engineering employer of choice in the Times Top Graduate Employers.

We are making some progress. Last year our gender diversity for senior managers increased from around 17% to 22%. And in terms of building a pipeline 23% of our 2000 apprentices are women.

Our gender balance on the executive committee has also doubled from less than 10% to more than 20% and we are continuously strengthening the gender balance of our emerging talent pipeline. For example, we recently brought our top 100 leaders from across the global business together at an annual conference and 40% of them were female.