By Jess McCabe | 2 October 2006, 08:45

Women are still shut out of the board rooms of the biggest companies in the UK, according to a report by Deloitte.

A tiny 3% of executive directors are women, and there has been no improvement at all over the last year.

Of the 350 top companies, only nine are run by women, and there are only two women running companies in the top 100.

Meanwhile, board room occupants are rewarding themselves with ever bigger pay rises, while the rest of us trail behind.

Deloitte’s research also shows that executives’ remuneration packages continue to increase in value at a much swifter rate than those of their employees. The typical executive director received a 6.8 per cent pay increase last year and was potentially eligible for a bonus worth 100 per cent of his salary, rising to 150 per cent at the 30 largest companies in Britain. In practice, bonus payments averaged 60 per cent of annual pay, compared with 50 per cent last year.

By contrast, national average earnings for the workforce as a whole, including bonuses, rose by only 4.4 per cent over the year to the end of July, according to the Bank of England.