Melrose appoints first female board member

One of the few remaining FTSE 100 companies with an all-male board has found a seat for its first female non-executive director.

Melrose, the FTSE 100-listed investment company, appointed accountant Liz Hewitt to its board, reducing the number of companies in the blue chip index with all-male boards to five. Hewitt was corporate affairs director of Smith & Nephew between 2004 and 2011.

Business secretary Vince Cable had written to Melrose and the other companies without women on their boards to remind them of the proposals set out by Lord Davies in February 2011 that a quarter of the seats should be held by women by 2015.

Another of the companies Cable wrote to – mining group Kazakhmys – has also recently appointed a female non-executive director, although the company has since fallen out of the FTSE 100 index.

Earlier this week Cable's department published data showing the proportion of women on FTSE 100 boards has increased to 19%, up from 12.5% when Davies first reported. But the proportion of executive directors stood at 6.1%, from 5.5%, raising concerns about the career progression of women through companies. When Davies first reported there were 21 all-male boards.