For years now, women have been fighting to be given the same level of responsibility and the same wages as men. In fact, in the UK a female executive doing the same job as a male gets an average of £10,000 less per year.
What is your opinion on this? Do you think more should be done to get women into higher positions, or do you think a person’s gender should not determine whether they are promoted or not. We love to hear your views. Here's an article discussing the matter with a few key words missing, can you guess the missing words?
Britain's biggest firms are 'spectacularly unsuccessful' at _1_ high-flying women to top jobs, management experts warn.
In a report today, the School of Management at Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, says firms are good at hiring young women to junior jobs, but too few make it to the top.
A separate report today from the Department for Business raises the prospect of _2_ being forced to hire a certain number of women on to their boards.
Lord Davies of Abersoch, who was appointed by ministers to _3_ the lack of women in boardrooms, urged firms to speed up their promotion or risk the consequences.
In his first report, published last year, he said FTSE 100 companies should reach a minimum target of 25 per cent of female _4_ on the board by 2015.
But he rejected the option of setting quotas, which exist in countries such as Norway.
The Prime Minister said the promotion of women to senior jobs had to 'accelerate' and that the case was 'overwhelming' that firms were run better if men and women worked alongside each other.
Speaking in Stockholm recently, he said: 'I don't think you should ever rule out [quotas] if you can't get there in other ways.'
The Department for Business said the number of women appointed to the _5_ of Britain’s biggest firms had achieved its ‘largest-ever annual increase’ over the past year.
In 1999, just 6.9 per cent of _6_ in the FTSE index of Britain's 100 biggest firms were women. Last year, it reached 12.5 per cent. It has since jumped sharply to 15.6 per cent, with more than one in four jobs now going to women.
But the problem remains that while many women join companies from school or university, only a tiny number reach the top.
Professor Susan Vinnicombe, co-author of Cranfield’s Female FTSE report, said: 'Many companies are successful at attracting women at entry level, and developing them and retaining them after _7_ leave'.
'But [they] are still spectacularly unsuccessful at promoting them to executive level.'
She said the figures were 'moving in the right direction' but a gulf still existed between the women who became executives and those in part-time non-executive jobs.
