Meet the average CEO of the top UK companies: He’s white, rich, and probably named Andrew.
People Managing People
The average CEO of a top UK company is white, rich, and probably named Andrew.
That’s according to an analysis by People Managing People of the CEOs of the top 100 companies on the LSE.
The researcher behind the analysis also used an AI tool to generate what “Andrew” might look like.
The average CEO of a top UK company is probably named Andrew, according to an analysis of the CEOs of the FTSE100 companies published by human resources publication People Managing People on Tuesday.
The FTSE100 index represents the top 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange by market capitalization.
“Andrew” — the average CEO of a FTSE100 company — is 55, a University of Cambridge economics graduate, employed by a financial services company, and took home an annual salary of £4,196,000, or around $5.1 million, according to the report.
The report’s data was collected in September from CEOs’ LinkedIn profiles, their companies’ annual reports, the UK’s business registry, and media reports.
The author of the report also used MidJourney, a generative AI tool, to blend profile images of the 100 CEOs to create a visual representation of what Andrew would look like.
People named Andrew don’t just make up a large slice of these top executives, however — twelve FTSE100 CEOs were named Andrew or Simon, outnumbering the total 11 female CEOs as of September, per the report.
The report also found that the average CEO of a FTSE100 company makes over 127 times the median UK salary in 2022 — which was £33,000.
“This glimpse into the corporate world underscores undeniable privileges and gender disparities for the top jobs at some of the biggest companies in the country,” Finn Bartram, the report’s author, told Insider.
This isn’t the first time someone has tried to put together a composite image of an average CEO of the top companies in the country.
The BBC also created a composite image of the CEOs from the top 100 Fortune 500 companies in the US as of 2018. And it’s an image that bears a striking resemblance to Andrew.
The BBC found that the vast majority of Fortune 500 CEOs were white and male — with only around 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs being women, as of 2018. That figure increased to 10% in 2023, an all-time high according to a Pew Research report published Wednesday.
To add context to CEO salaries, the Economic Policy Institute found that in 2021, the top 350 US CEOs made 399 times more than the average American’s annual salary. This disparity marks the widest gap the institute has recorded from 1965 to 2021.