Dame Carolyn McCall

I think the reason why we’ve joined 25×25 is because you and I have probably been involved in gender equality for, I don’t know, 30 years—maybe more, actually. So, all my career, all my working life, and certainly since I’ve had positions where I can have a positive impact, I’ve been involved in it. And I chaired Opportunity Now for a period of time—for about four years, five years, and what strikes me is that despite the focus on diversity, equality and inclusion, actually, the pace of change at senior levels in the organisation, for women, remains quite slow.

And if you look at the FTSE, if you look at very senior positions in many other aspects of life, you would have expected much more progress.

And I think, therefore, companies have got to be—including ITV—have got to be very conscious about how hard it is to make change and also what action we can take, rather than what words we can speak about equality. And that applies as much to gender equality as anything else.

I think that’s so important because, actually, a lot of very good work has been done for women in companies. But mainly the focus has been since Mervyn Davies [Baron Davies of Abersoch, CBE] did his report on non-exec directors and the paucity of them 15 years ago. That has definitely improved—I think most boards are now 30, 35% female.

But it’s mainly the Executive that create the culture of an organisation, and if the culture isn’t right then gender equality—or any other equality, actually—has barriers everywhere. So for me, I think it was the right focus to start really thinking about the executive pipeline for CEO.