Alison Carnwath: 'It's lonely being only woman chairman in FTSE 100' Alison Carnwath, chairman of Land Securities, backed the report's several recommendations to help more women reach board-level in companies, including better gender pay gap reporting, training on "unconscious bias" to help prevent male managers recruit and promote "like-for-like" employees, and more formalised return-to-work schemes for mothers. "It is a very lonely position being the only female who is a chairman of a FTSE 100 company," she said, urging business women not to get disheartened by the lack of female chairmen. "It's a great job, for those of you who aspire to get there," she said. The report, by the Conservative Women's Forum, comes as a separate study by the Department for Business select committee, a group of cross-party MPs, will today outline its own recommendations for feeding the pipeline of women to the top. It is expected to include recommendations on tightening equal pay audit law to push companies to get better at reporting. The Forum said companies should collect and publish stats on the number of women they employ at each level, the number of employees promoted by gender and the average pay gap at each rank, if Britain is ever to get to the bottom of its "women's problem" in business. Currently around 17pc of FTSE 100 board roles are taken up by women, but most of these are non-executive positions. The number of women in core, executive board jobs has actually declined since 2007 to just 18, compared to 292 males, the latest official statistics show. However, Ms Carnwath admitted that Land Securities currently does not go to the level or detail of reporting that the MPs are calling for - but that her company could do so in "about a year." Elsewhere, the Banking Commission - a different group of MPs and peers - called for more women to become City traders to help dispel a culture on trading floors that is "overwhelmingly male." But Mary Macleod, co-chair of the Forum, said without decent statistics on gender break down, to help understand where the problem lied, or at which stage women dropped out of the workforce, businesses would never be able to address the problem. At present, the Equality Act allows for the introduction of rules that would require private sector employers to undertake equal pay audits, but such regulations have not been implemented. Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister, last year said employment tribunals would be given the power to make employers who are found guilty of sex discrimination to carry out equal pay audits, but this has not been introduced yet.