The print and marketing supply chain remains, in aggregate, a sector where senior leadership is still predominantly male. The proportion of women in Director-level and above roles across the five sector verticals we serve has improved meaningfully over the past five years — but the improvement is unevenly distributed, and the pace of change at the most senior levels (MD, Group CEO, Board) remains too slow to be confident about trajectory.
Where Progress Has Been Made
The clearest progress has been in marketing services, where the broader talent pipeline has a more balanced gender composition and where the cultural and organisational norms are more aligned with the kind of flexibility and visibility that enables women to reach senior roles. Account Director, Client Services Director and Operations Director roles in marketing services are now frequently filled by women, and this is beginning to feed through into Commercial Director appointments.
In packaging, there is measurable progress in technical and innovation leadership, driven partly by the graduate pipeline in food science, materials engineering and sustainability — disciplines where gender balance in graduate intakes is broadly even. Technical Directors and R&D leaders who are women are an increasing feature of the packaging sector, and a number of high-profile MD appointments in the past two years have gone to women with strong technical backgrounds.
Where the Gaps Remain
Commercial print remains the area with the most significant gap, particularly in senior sales and operational roles. The structural reasons are complex — a predominantly male shop floor culture in many businesses, limited flexibility in production-facing roles, and a historical bias in how sales capability has been identified and developed. The businesses making genuine progress in this space are those that have made a deliberate, leadership-level commitment to changing how they identify and develop commercial talent — not just adding a diversity statement to their recruitment brief.
At the very top — MD and CEO roles in print, POS and promotional merchandise — the numbers remain stubbornly male-dominated. This is partly a pipeline issue: there are fewer women at Commercial Director level to draw from. But it also reflects persistent structural biases in how businesses assess leadership candidates for the most senior roles.
What Works
From our placement experience, the businesses making the most genuine progress on gender diversity in senior leadership share a common approach: they have committed senior male allies who actively sponsor high-potential women within their organisations; they have assessed and adjusted their hiring processes to reduce structural bias; and they have been honest with themselves about the cultural changes required to retain women who reach senior levels, not just hire them.
Tokenism — adding a diversity agenda to a hiring brief without changing the underlying culture or process — is visible to candidates and counterproductive. The best senior female candidates in our sectors can read a business’s genuine commitment to inclusion very quickly.
We are committed to providing balanced candidate shortlists across all of our senior searches, and to working with clients who are genuinely committed to building inclusive leadership teams. We’re happy to discuss our approach to inclusive search on any specific appointment.
