And then there were 11 ... the falling number of women leading Britain's top businesses ...

Marjorie Scardino left Pearson in 2012

It hasn't felt like a great year for women at the very top of British business.

There have been some outstanding commercial results - Louise Makin at BTG and Kate Swann at WH Smith stand out - but the number of women CEOs has fallen.

Marjorie Scardino left Pearson in late 2012 and Cynthia Carroll Anglo-America in February. Kate Swann has announced she will leave WH Smith in June this year after almost 10 years in which she has transformed the company's fortunes.

These departures reduce the number of FTSE 350 companies led by women to 11, just 3% of the total ...

1. Louise Makin BTG
2. Angela Ahrendts Burberry
3. Dido Harding Talk Talk
4. Carolyn McCall Easy Jet
5. Ruby McGregor-Smith MITIE
6. Harriet Green Thomas Cook
7. Dorothy Thompson DRAX
8. Caroline Banszky Law Debenture
9. Alison Cooper Imperial Tobacco
10. Lyn Fordham SVG Capital
11. Katherine Garrett-Cox Alliance Trust

There are certainly some very able women serving as executive directors and particularly CFOs of FTSE 350 companies but there numbers are increasing very slowly.

The % of women executive directors has increased from just 5.5% to 5.8% since the publication of the Davies Report in 2011.  Only 8% of executive appointments over this period have been women.

Unless we see significant growth in the number of women executive directors, it is very hard to see from where the next generation of women CEOs will come.

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