GSK GSK plc

By Saabira Chaudhuri 

LONDON-- Emma Walmsley's appointment as GlaxoSmithKline PLC's next chief executive puts her in line to become the highest-profile woman in corporate Britain.

Ms. Walmsley, 47, will take up her new post next year when current CEO Andrew Witty steps down on March 31.

With her elevation, Britain's FTSE 100--a list of the country's biggest blue-chip companies by market capitalization--will gain its seventh female CEO.

The CEOs of EasyJet PLC, Imperial Brands PLC, Whitbread PLC, Royal Mail PLC, Kingfisher PLC and Severn Trent PLC are also women. But GlaxoSmithKline is much bigger than all of these, with a market capitalization of GBP80.2 billion ($104.7 billion), according to FactSet. That compares with GBP38 billion for Imperial Brands, the second-biggest on the list.

In the U.S., the S&P 100 index has nine female CEOs at companies including General Motors Co., Oracle Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., according to the most recent available data from nonprofit Catalyst.

The upper echelons of Britain's big companies have been getting more diverse in recent years, with the number of women on the boards of Britain's 350 largest publicly traded companies more than doubling since 2011. There are no more all-male boards left in the FTSE 100.

Glaxo Chairman Philip Hampton--along with Helen Alexander, chairman of UBM PLC--earlier this year was appointed by the U.K. government to chair a review on the number of senior female executives at FTSE 350 companies.

Despite all this, the number of female executive directors at FTSE 100 companies still stands at 10%, while with Ms. Walmsley's appointment the number of female CEOs on the index has climbed by just two since 2010.

Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, has called for companies to look beyond the boardroom to executive roles. "We don't have enough women running things," she said earlier this year.

According to CBI data from January, there are only nine more female executive directors on FTSE 350 boards than in 2010, while the number of female chief executives has stayed roughly flat. Data from a global McKinsey & Co. report last year shows that if men and women participated equally in the workforce, gross domestic product could rise by $12 trillion, or 11%, by 2025.

Write to Saabira Chaudhuri at saabira.chaudhuri@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 20, 2016 06:48 ET (10:48 GMT)

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