There is one thing that never ceases to amaze me when I see some of the new data that comes out around the percentage of female CEOs UK companies have. It’s shocking, honestly. Is only 10% of FTSE 100 chief executives women? Ten percent. In 2025. It’s shocking, isn’t it?

But here’s the thing. The women at the top are running big operations and making hard decisions, and they are proving every day that they are damn good at it. Now, in this list of the top 10 female CEOs UK companies currently have is a demonstration of what leadership really means.

Amanda Blanc Sorting Out Aviva

The Aviva CEO, Amanda Blanc, grew up in the Welsh valleys. Her dad was a steelworker. She started as a trainee at an insurance company and rose through the ranks over three decades. None of the fancy degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. Just hard work and being the smartest person in every room.

When she bought Aviva last year, the company was a mess. Too many businesses, no direction, stock price way down. She stripped it down, removed the pieces that weren’t working and focused on the elements of what Aviva does well. Insurance. Simple.

She was the first woman to chair the Association of British Insurers. Insurance isn’t glamorous, but it’s giant, and she’s at the very top of that. Her pay sparks fights now and then, but show me a male CEO who doesn’t get paid a fortune.

Liv Garfield and the Water Company Nobody Likes

Liv runs Severn Trent. Water companies are about as popular right now as a wet weekend in Blackpool, given the sewage spills and soaring bills. She’s gotten a lot of stick about her pay, and, frankly, for the record, some of it she has coming. Nobody should be banking millions of pounds while rivers run with sewage.

But this is what people don’t write about. She’s an engineer, which is not very common. She knows how water systems actually work. She has been CEO since 2014, one of the longest-serving female business leaders UK companies have. That is eleven years in a job where everybody wants to take a pop at you!

Severn Trent has invested billions in infrastructure. Other water companies went bankrupt or were bought out. Hers didn’t. Whether or not you approve of privatised water, she has kept the company going through some genuinely tough periods.

Alison Brittain Keeping Premier Inn Going

You have lived in a Premier Inn. Of course you have. Everyone has. That purple sign’s everywhere. Alison Brittain has been running Whitbread, which owns them, since 2015.

She was from banking, something that sounded strange to me back then. What does Lloyds Banking Group have to do with hotel chains? But she made it work. It expanded into Germany, modernised the restaurants (although Beefeater’s are still hit and miss, if we’re being honest), and got through Covid when hospitality was literally on its knees.

Her approach is steady. No bombshell announcements or splashy changes. Just improving things bit by bit, year after year. Sometimes that’s exactly what works.

Margherita Della Valle’s Vodafone Headache

When she became Vodafone’s CEO in 2023, Margherita got given one of the worst jobs in British business. Vodafone’s been struggling for years. Everyone’s switching to cheaper networks, the firm is losing subscribers and the share price has been rubbish.

She’s Italian, worked in Vodafone finance for ages and has just been promoted to clear up the mess. She has sold bits of the business, cut thousands of jobs and sought to make Vodafone important again. It is grim work, and whether it will succeed is anyone’s guess.

But at least she’s making decisions. Sometimes you inherit something broken and just have to start cutting.

Allison Kirkby Fixing BT

Allison took over as BT’s CEO in February 2024. She is the first woman to have held that job in 178 years.  She’s Scottish, started as a trainee accountant in the whisky business, and worked her way up through telecoms in Sweden and Denmark.

The job’s a nightmare, honestly. BT’s been struggling for ages. Fibre rollout costs billions. She’s had to cut 55,000 jobs, which is a bit grim. That’s people’s livelihoods gone.

She’s not shy about complaining that the government and Ofcom make life harder for BT than telecoms firms abroad face. Whether that’s fair or just moaning, who knows.

It’s too early to say if she’ll turn it round. But she took on one of the toughest jobs in British business anyway.

Emma Walmsley Leaving GSK

Emma is standing down from GSK in January. She’s been there since 2017, overseeing one of Britain’s largest pharmaceutical companies during some absolutely mental times.

She had come from L’Oréal, a fact that raised some eyebrows. Lipstick to prescription drugs was a strange leap. However, she broke the company up and targeted GSK on medicines and vaccines whilst addressing COVID, as everybody suddenly became an armchair epidemiologist overnight.

Activist investors gave her grief. Results were mixed. But eight years at the helm of a pharma giant during a pandemic? That’s no small feat. She’s leaving GSK in better shape than she found it, which is kind of literally the job description.

Milena Mondini Stepping Up at Admiral

Milena took over as Admiral’s CEO in 2023. She had been there 20 years before she had risen to the top job, and I figure that’s how it should work. Learn the business upside down and backwards, then run it.

Admiral is the car insurance company that advertises with strange opera-singing ads. They’ve remained independent as other insurers were gobbled up or merged into larger groups. Under Milena, they’re growing in Europe and rolling out new products.

She’s fairly new as CEO, so it’s early days. But Admiral’s doing well, and she knows every corner of that business. That matters.

Roisin Currie Making Greggs Even More Massive

Roisin took over as Greggs CEO in 2022, becoming the company’s first female boss in its 83-year history. She had worked her way up through people management and retail operations, starting in 2010.

Greggs is all over the place, isn’t it? You can’t stride down any high street without seeing one. Under Roisin, they’ve opened several hundred more shops. She has 33,000 people working for her, each day pumping out sausage rolls and vegan steak bakes.

She came from Asda, where she spent two decades learning the retail business inside out. Now she’s the boss of one of Britain’s most successful high street chains. She received an appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire this year for services to hospitality, and it’s certainly well earned.

I like Roisin because she genuinely seems to care about the staff. When you’ve got that many people working for you, treating them properly makes a massive difference. She’s not just about numbers and profits.

Zillah Byng-Thorne Running Dignity

Zillah’s the current CEO of Dignity, the funeral services firm. Earlier, she was the chief executive of Future plc starting in 2014 and made it one of the most successful media companies in Britain. The Guardian referred to her as one of the UK’s most successful female business leaders, and they were right.

She joined as an accountant, climbed the ranks through various finance jobs and eventually rose to become chief executive. Under her leadership at Future, the value of the company grew tenfold to more than £4 billion from about £30 million. That’s not a typo. Four billion.

Now she’s at Dignity, so that’s another kettle of fish entirely. Funerals are not exactly a growth industry in the conventional sense, but someone has to operate these businesses. She’s got that financial brain and knows how to turn things around when it comes to a business.

She’s also mum to three boys and stepmum to two more. Five kids whilst running major companies. I can barely manage my two and a part-time job, so fair play to her.

Dawn Ellen Keeping Haleon Going

Dawn was appointed CFO of Haleon when it separated from GSK in 2022. Haleon is the consumer health part of the business that delivers Panadol, Sensodyne and all those things you have in your bathroom cabinet. She has spent years at GSK and Haleon in a variety of finance positions.

Sure, being CFO of an FTSE 100 company isn’t quite the same as being CEO. But she is a member of the leadership team running a multibillion-dollar health care company. She’s Scottish, trained as a chartered accountant, and worked her way up through some pretty challenging finance roles.

The thing with being a CFO is that it can be a stepping stone to becoming CEO. That’s the pipeline. Dawn’s in that pipeline now. Whether she’ll make the jump to CEO somewhere remains to be seen, but she’s got the experience and the track record.

Why the FTSE 100 Female CEOs Number’s Rubbish

Right, back to those numbers. At one point, there were 11 female FTSE 100 CEOs. Now it’s waning, as some are leaving and others are not being replaced by women. Emma Walmsley’s going. That’ll make it worse.

In the meantime, women make up about 43% of board positions. So they’re on boards, but not in charge. But still banging up that glass ceiling when it comes to the job itself, huh?

And that’s not because women can’t do it. That’s obvious nonsense. These are CEOs who prove this every day. It’s because the system is still based on making things favourable for men. Old networks, unconscious bias, and ideas about who “looks like” a leader. All that.

What Happens Next

The current crop of the top 10 female CEOs UK firms have at the moment are doing good work. But ten isn’t enough, is it? We need 50. We want it so normal that nobody writes articles about this anymore.

And by that, they mean companies actually developing female talent, not just talking about it. It means boards putting forward the best person, not simply the safest pair of hands. It means women supporting other women instead of pulling up the ladder behind them.

These 10 CEOs didn’t end up where they are by chance. They worked harder than most people could conceive, proved that they could handle the job better than anyone else, and yet faced more scrutiny than their male counterparts. They run billion-pound companies; they employ thousands of people, and they make decisions that impact millions.

They’ve earned their positions. Now we need more of them.