The relative paucity of women in senior executive positions – only 15 per cent of the total by current reckoning – has long been a cause of hand-wringing in European boardrooms. Recently, that concern has been accompanied by hope that an extraordinary pipeline of talented young women graduates – 50 to 60 per cent of recruits joining European businesses – will change the gender landscape of executive boards in the coming decade. But what if that pipeline has a leak?

At the Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business, an independent facility that is part of London Business School, we have just surveyed 61 European companies and other organisations to determine how they measure and manage gender issues. The results are disturbing. While many companies are devoting energy to priming the female talent pipeline, less effort is going towards ensuring it flows all the way to the top.