Vince Cable urges eight FTSE 100 firms with male-only boards to employ women execs

Business Secretary will ask firms with men-only boards to hire more female executives

Vince Cable will write to the bosses of eight FTSE 100 companies which still have male-only boardrooms.

At an event to mark the second anniversary of the '30 per cent Club', a group aimed to get 30 per cent more women on boards without compulsory quotas, the Business Secretary read out the names of the companies with men-only boards.

He also confirmed he would contact their chief execs to urge them to 'up their game' in terms of diversifiying their boards.

The eight, Antofagasta, Croda, Glencore, Xstrata, Kazakhmys, Melrose, Randgold and Vedanta, are mostly mining and natural resources companies with their headquarters outside the UK.

However, they list their shares on the London Stock Exchange, and Cable says 'there are certain obligations in terms of governance that go with that.'

The government has stepped away from introducing compulsory boardroom representation for women, but instead have adopted proposals by the former banker Lord Davies that 25 per cent of boardroom seats should be held by women by 2015.

The six-monthly progress report, published on Friday, showed that the percentage of women in boardrooms has increased from 12.4 per cent to 17.4 per cent in the 18 months since the Davies review.

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