If there is ever a time for women to make a decisive breakthrough in corporate boardrooms, it is surely now. Many boards, especially in financial services, are in flux after the testosterone-fuelled excesses that led to financial disaster. There is a desperate need to rebuild trust, more easily achieved if boards better reflect customers and the public.

Yet history suggests change will be painfully slow. In the UK, only 11.7 per cent of FTSE 100 directors are female – up by barely five percentage points over 10 years, according to Cranfield University School of Management. As Helen Alexander, president-nominee of the CBI employers’ group, pointed out in an FT interview, that is a loss of real talent. The message applies equally to other forms of diversity, including race and social background. We have seen too many examples of the blinkered “groupthink” to which boards drawn from a narrow social range are prone.