The number of UK female chief executives and managing directors has leapt by 25% in the past year, according to an in-depth study.

The Pearlfinders data, published in The Daily Telegraph and based on interviews with over 13,000 senior managers in the first half of 2011 and of 2012, show that the number of women in top posts increased from 11.6% last year to 14.5% in 2012 - a rise of a quarter.

Its finding reveal that there was a small rise in the number of females working in second-level senior roles, such as director, chief finance officer and chief marketing officer.

The results emerge as MEPs discuss whether to compel UK companies to appoint more women to their boards as well as reigniting the debate of whether to bring in mandatory quotas.

Anthony Cooper, managing director of Pearlfinders, the information trends consultancy that carried out the research, said the UK had witnessed an improvement in the number of women at the top, suggesting organisations are getting serious about improving workplace diversity.

But he noted that the numbers were still too small and predicted that when additional government and industry pressures were brought to bear, these figures would rise still further.

Other key findings revealed that just 4% of FTSE 100 companies have female CEOs. And last week's announcement that Marjorie Scardino's resignation from FT publisher, Pearson, means that only Burberry, Imperial Tobacco and Anglo American have female CEOs.

But women do make up 16.7% of all board posts in the FTSE 100, up from 12.5% the year before. The upswing follows the 2011 targets introduced by former trade minister Lord Davis to increase the number of board level women.

When looking at all FTSE companies, Pearlfinders found only a marginal increase in female execs from 2011/2012. In the first nine months of 2011, it recorded 31.5% of FTSE female directors which rose to just to just 32.4% during the same period in 2012.

Cooper said: 'These are not significantly higher than in private companies, and we would have expected a sharper increase.'

FTSE 100 companies have been tasked with hitting a voluntary target of raising female board representation to 25% by 2015 with the threat of EU-imposed mandatory quotas in the UK if they do not make sufficient progress.

Currently, retail, charity and the legal sector can boasts the highest number of women in senior management roles, while manufacturing and motoring trail far behind with less than a fifth of senior positions taken up by women, the figures reveal.