Eighty percent of head-hunters believe the Davies Report will fail, with 60 percent claiming that firms should more than double Women on Boards, more than twice the figure when poled in 2011.

New figures compiled by InterExec, the Confidential Agent for executives earning £150k – £1million+, have revealed that 80 percent of senior executive head-hunters believe that firms will fail to meet the recommendations by the Davies report, that companies should more than double the women on their boards by 2015. The figures, which were compiled from a survey of 80 head-hunters right across the UK, also reveal that 83 percent of those surveyed believe that there is a danger that the recommendations will result in some optimal candidates being turned down as a result of positive discrimination.

Conversely, 61 percent of head-hunters (twice as many as last year’s survey) agree that firms should more than double the women on their boards by 2015. Kit Scott-Brown, managing director of InterExec, commented: “The most important outcome of any recruitment process is that the best candidate gets the role, any kind of discrimination, positive or not, is not in the interest of the employer.

Although everybody in the recruitment industry agrees that there is a need for greater representation of women in the board room, every appointment should be on merit alone.”