Egon Zehnder To Start Initiative To Increase Female CEOs At FTSE 100 Companies

October 3, 2014 – Spearheaded by newly added U.K. managing director, Miranda Pode, Egon Zehnder will start an initiative to unsettle male-dominated executive positions of the U.K.’s FTSE 100 companies; currently there are only five women in such positions at these organizations. Egon Zehnder hopes to increase this number by 2025 when it launches its "25 by 25" initiative this month. According to sources, The Royal Mail chief Moya Greene, one of the five women holding executive positions, is expected to help launch the initiative. The program aims to be more ambitious than the U.K. Government's plan to get the ratio of women in boardrooms to one in four women by next year, as it includes women in non-executive roles. Egon Zehnder has said that one in six new CEOs appointed over the next decade needs to be female in order to reach 25 females by 2025. With two-thirds of chief executive positions being filled by internal candidates, the firm is taking steps to prepare women to meet this target, including identifying women who have leadership potential, helping their FTSE 100 clients to identify their own internal high-talented female employees, launching a leadership development program for potential chief executives and discussing the career ambitions and development plans with individual women.