A report in the Financial Times warns that Britain's boardrooms are "in crisis" over their failure to increase the number of women in their ranks and will face quotas is they do not embrace new voluntary targets to double the female representation on boards within four years.
Lord Davies has led a government inquiry on the issue of women in the boardroom and will today recommend that FTSE 100 companies aim for a least 25% of their boards to be made up by women by 2015, while FTSE 350 companies should clearly outline the percentage of women they expect to see on their boards by 2013 and 2015.
However Lord Davies warned that this was the "last chance" corporate Britain would have to force through change itself and said statutory quotas would be brought in if voluntary targets failed to produce the desired results. He went on to say that all chairmen should announce their aspirational goals for women on boards within the next six months and publish their own targets, and then comply with them or explain why they had not done so.