In the past few months Barbara Cassani, the former CEO of Go Airlines, was appointed to head London's 2012 Olympics bid and sit on the board of Britain's largest retailer of food and clothing, Marks & Spencer. Shell CFO Judith Boynton was promoted to the board of her company, and Laura Tyson made waves as head of the London Business School. Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino led a prominent magazine's list of the most powerful women executives outside the United States, and others, like Morgan Stanley Europe vice chair Amelia Fawcett and Burberry CEO Rose Marie Bravo, also made the cut.
There's just one problem with all these British achievers, they're all Americans.
According to a recent study by Britain’s Cranfield School of Management, 32 percent of women who sit on the boards of companies on the FTSE 100, an index of the largest British companies, are from overseas. (Though no comparable figure exists for men, experts estimate it's much lower.)
The majority of those women are American. As one well-known British headhunter puts it, “If you want to sit on a board in Britain, you’d better be American—or have a title.”