Who Leads the 2026 FTSE 100?

CEO pipelines can narrow long before a board sets out to choose an executive team leader.

As soaring artificial intelligence adoption and geopolitical and economic uncertainties create compounding volatility, executive team demographics have not remained high on every board’s priority list. At the same time, these complex issues put ever greater demands on the CEO role, contributing to a significant decline in interest in the top job across the C-suite.

That combination pressures CEO pipelines, but it can also be an opportunity for boards to widen the candidate lens and focus on the leadership capabilities required today.  Doing so can create more leadership optionality by identifying candidates who might otherwise be overlooked. With men holding 92% of CEO roles in today’s FTSE 100, it’s clear that half the population is being under-utilized when it comes to expanding CEO pipelines. An important starting point is understanding where women are represented today, and where they may still be overlooked.

Russell Reynolds Associates’ second analysis of FTSE 100 executive leadership examines where women leaders’ representation stands today and how it’s changed since 2024. This year, we combine snapshots from 2024 and 2026 with longitudinal tracking of leaders’ progression to CEO, focusing on leaders expressly named to an organization’s executive committee (ExCo).

Our findings tell a nuanced story: Women leaders' overall representation in the FTSE 100 has changed little since 2024. However, beneath that relative stability, progress remains uneven and the path to the very top remains narrow. A closer look at how representation is changing reveals that headline figures alone can mask crucial distinctions.

• Women leaders’ overall representation in the FTSE 100 continues to lag population benchmarks, with the most profound gaps at the CEO level.

• Women’s representation increased in several core functions, but it declined in several innovation-related roles.

• While lower representation in key feeder positions remains a challenge in women’s pathway to CEO, they made meaningful gains in one key role: CFO.

• Breadth vs. depth: More companies reached moderate representation thresholds, but deeper gains remained limited.

The UK has made significant strides in increasing transparency around gender representation, but visibility alone doesn’t guarantee continued progress. Understanding what’s beneath the headline numbers is critical to identifying where advancement is enduring and where barriers remain.

Our report provides a rigorous view of how women executives’ representation is evolving across the FTSE 100 and what these shifts mean for boards, CEOs, and CHROs building the next generation of senior leadership.

Where are we now? Women’s 2026 representation across FTSE 100 leadership

Women leaders’ overall representation in the FTSE 100 continues to lag population benchmarks, with the most profound gaps at the CEO level

While women make up 51% of the UK population, they hold only 32% of the leadership roles at its top organizations (Figure 1).

This gap widens at the top of the house. As of Q3 2026, women held only 8% of the CEO roles in the FTSE 100, down a percentage point from 2024.

The traditional CEO feeder roles of CFO, P&L leaders, and COOs (although less common in the UK) also show noteworthy gaps: Women hold 34% of FTSE 100 CFO roles, 23% of P&L roles, and 29% of COO roles, further narrowing their representation in CEO pipelines.

Figure 1: FTSE 100 gender distribution by executive role (2026)

_{Source: RRA proprietary analyses, FTSE 100 leadership teams, 2026 (n = 100 companies, 952 executives). Percentages represent women’s and men’s share of leaders within each role category.}

Women’s representation increased in several core functions, but declined in several innovation-related roles

While the percentage of FTSE 100 women leaders generally mirrors our 2024 analysis, there was significant movement across roles (Figure 2). Most notably, women’s representation increased in several core functional and operating positions: Women hold 34% of CFO roles (+9.3pp), 84% of CHRO roles (+4.5pp), and 23% of the P&L leader roles (+2.4pp).

Conversely, representation declined in critical strategy and innovation roles: Women now hold only 24% of CIO/CTO roles (-2.1pp), 28% of product/engineering science roles (-11.3pp), and 20% of strategy roles (-16.1pp).

These drops are concerning, as innovation capability is becoming increasingly central to CEO readiness. As AI’s integration into the workforce accelerates, the ability to drive artificial intelligence adoption and lead transformative change is becoming a critical leadership competency. Yet our prior research shows a disconnect between capability and perception: in our analysis of nearly 750 CEOs in the global media, men were twice as likely to be described as “innovators,” even as women leaders are on par with—and on several measures ahead of—men on generative AI adoption, AI confidence, and AI governance.

Against that backdrop, declining women’s representation in roles tied to strategy, technology, and innovation may further narrow CEO pipelines.

Figure 2: Changes in FTSE 100 gender distribution by executive role (2024, 2026)

_{Source: RRA proprietary analyses, FTSE100 leadership teams, 2026 (n = 100 companies, 952 executives); 2024 (n = 97 companies, 990 executives). This graphic compares year-specific snapshots; changes represent the percentage-point difference in women’s representation within each role from 2024 to 2026.}

While lower representation in CEO feeder positions remains a challenge in women’s pathway to CEO, there were meaningful gains in one key role

Of the 894 non-CEOs observed in 2024, 11 had been appointed CEO by 2026 (Figure 3). All 11 came from three of these four CEO “feeder” roles (or an interim CEO position): CFO (5), commercial leaders¹ (an emergent feeder over the last two years) (3), P&L leader (2), and interim CEO (1).

Women are less likely than men to hold any one of these roles. Of those 894 non-CEOs observed in 2024, 62% of the men were in a CEO feeder role, compared with only 36% of the women.

However, while men still hold the majority of these important titles, we observed some meaningful changes over the past two years. Since 2024, women’s representation increased across all four feeder roles (Figure 2), with the CFO role seeing the largest gains of 9 percentage points. This was the first time in our tracking that the share of women CFOs outpaced the overall share of women leaders in the FTSE 100 (34% vs 32%), marking significant gains in a historically male-dominated role that serves as a key pathway to CEO.

This shift may be partly attributable to evolving UK board diversity requirements. Since 2022, the Financial Conduct Authority has required listed companies to disclose whether women hold at least 40% of board seats and at least one of four senior board positions: chair, CEO, CFO, or senior independent director. With relatively few women occupying chair and CEO positions, these targets may have increased the focus on appointing women CFOs.

Figure 3: Gender differences on the path to CEO (2024-2026)

_{Source: RRA proprietary analyses, FTSE 100 leadership teams, 2024 and 2026. The top panel includes the full 2024 non-CEO leadership population (n = 894, 590 men and 304 women) and shows the percentage holding one of five CEO feeder roles. The lower panel uses the independent 2026 snapshot and shows women’s representation within the four feeder roles. Interim CEO is not shown on the lower panel because there was only one interim CEO. The dashed line represents women’s 32.2% share of all FTSE leaders in 2026.}

Breadth vs. depth: More companies reached moderate representation thresholds, but deeper gains remain limited

To understand how gender mix varies within organizations, we next examined the composition of each FTSE 100 executive team.

Among the 87 FTSE 100 companies with at least five identified executive-team leaders², two executive teams didn’t include any women (Figure 4). Five teams had only one woman onboard. And women hold fewer than 25% of roles on a quarter (22) of the 87 leadership teams we examined.

Only eight organizations have an executive team of at least 50% women leaders.

Figure 4: 2026 FTSE 100 executive leadership team gender diversity snapshot

_{Source: RRA proprietary analysis, FTSE 100 leadership teams, 2026. Analysis of 87 FTSE 100 companies with at least five executives on their identified leadership team, representing 918 executives in total. Categories are cumulative, not mutually exclusive.}

Over the last two years, we observed some notable representation shifts at the executive team level. The share of FTSE senior leadership teams with at least 25% women on their ExCo rose 2.5 percentage points, while the share with at least one third women increased by 4.1 points. However, these gains have not extended to higher thresholds of representation. In fact, executive teams comprising at least 50% women declined by 3 percentage points in 2026.

Authors

Hetty Pye is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Board & CEO Advisory practice and is the co-founder of RRA Artemis. She is based in London.
Margot McShane co-leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Board & CEO Advisory practice and is the co-founder of RRA Artemis. She is based in San Francisco.
Emma Combe is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Board & CEO Advisory practice. She is based in London.
Leah Christianson is a member of The Leadership Lab at Russell Reynolds Associates. She is based in San Francisco.
Ladye Cook is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Board & CEO practice’s Commercial Strategy & Insights team. She is based in Los Angeles.
Corey Tatel is a member of The Leadership Lab at Russell Reynolds Associates. He is based in Washington DC.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the following colleagues for their contributions to this data collection and analysis.

• Olivia Wagner of RRA’s Business Technology Office
• Itta Behrman and Ellie Langdon, RRA’s 2026 San Francisco summer interns

Methodology

Defining leadership teams
For the analysis, RRA examined the senior leadership teams of FTSE 100 companies, focusing on leaders explicitly identified by their organizations as members of the executive committee or equivalent senior leadership body. Leadership team membership and executive information were identified using BoardEx, a people-intelligence data provider, and company websites.

Data was collected and analyzed in Q3 2026. Any changes to the FTSE 100 and leadership team compositions after Q3 are not reflected in this report.

The analyses included 990 executives in 2024 and 952 executives in 2026. Because the size and structure of executive committees vary considerably across organizations, company-level analyses of leadership-team composition were limited to organizations with at least five identified executive-team leaders. This resulted in 90 eligible organizations in 2024 and 87 in 2026.

We compared women’s representation across FTSE 100 leadership with the UK population benchmark using population estimates by sex from UK Office for National Statistics.

Identifying gender
Gender data comes directly from BoardEx. Due to the sensitivity and complexity of this data, no findings are reported about individual executives; all gender data are analyzed and reported in aggregate.

Mapping job and role types
Our data sources provide information on each executive’s job title and responsibilities. However, titles and organizational structures vary substantially across companies and industries. To enable comparison, we categorized executives into a common set of leadership-role groups based on their title and responsibilities.

The principal role categories used in the analyses were CEO, CFO, COO, P&L Leader, CHRO, CIO/CTO, CMO, Commercial, General Counsel, Operations/Supply Chain/Logistics, Product/Engineering/Science, and Strategy.

Analytical approach
The analysis uses year-specific snapshots to examine changes in representation between 2024 and 2026, alongside a longitudinal analysis of individual leaders’ progression to CEO. Snapshot analyses describe the FTSE 100 leadership population observed in each study year independently; leaders and organizations did not need to appear in both study years to be included.

For company-level snapshot analyses of executive team composition, we included organizations with at least five executives on their identified leadership team. This resulted in 90 organizations in 2024 and 87 organizations in 2026.

Longitudinal analyses track the same leaders or organizations across multiple observations. Company-level longitudinal analyses were limited to 76 organizations observed in both 2024 and 2026 that had at least five executives in each year.

For the CEO-pipeline analysis, we examined the 2024 starting positions of non-CEO leaders and whether those leaders were observed as CEOs in 2026. CEO feeder roles were defined as P&L Leader, CFO, COO, Commercial, and Interim CEO. Interim CEO was included as a feeder role in the longitudinal analysis but it was not shown as a separate role in the 2026 snapshot because it is a temporary status and only one such case was observed.

Footnotes

_{¹ Refers to leaders in merchandizing, retail, revenue, sales, eCommerce, growth, and customer (CX) roles. See methodology for more details.
² Also worth noting: While our analysis only included organizations with executive teams of 5+ leaders to ensure our team-level analysis wasn’t skewed by small samples, 30 of the 34 leaders across the 13 excluded organizations were men. As a result, company-level findings may present a somewhat more favorable picture of gender representation than the full 2026 FTSE 100 population.}