17.12.2024
In February 2018, we signed HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter, a commitment to improve gender balance across the financial services sector at every level.
We’re proud to see an increase in the number of women in our senior management roles and to have achieved 48% female representation at senior management level.
Our progress since 2018
When we signed the charter in 2018, our goal was for 40% of senior managers to be women by 2021.
In August 2020, we had already surpassed this target by achieving 42.4%. As a result, we increased our target to 45% by December 2023.
At that point, we hadn’t met our target and extended this to March 2025, to coincide with our current strategic objectives.
However, as of August 2024, we’re pleased to have exceeded our target, with our female representation at senior management being 48%.
Supporting female leaders
One of the ways we’re nurturing our future female leaders is through our network for women, Empowering Women. This network provides an open forum where topics can be discussed in a safe and confidential environment.
We’re also supporting women at more junior levels through mentoring to help with their personal development.
By collaborating with other organisations in the financial services sector, we aim to address industry-wide issues affecting representation. We’ve partnered with Investment 20/20 to work with local schools to give young people insights into investment careers. We’ve also partnered with Career Returners, who support those who have taken extended career breaks, to help them return to fulfilling employment.
Working towards gender parity
Our ultimate long-term goal is to achieve gender parity, and we remain positive that we’ll continue to surpass our 45% target, despite having a small senior leadership team where a change in one role can have a big impact.
Women continue to make up half of our Board and Executive Committee, who support our goal to improve gender balance across other levels of our organisation.
We’ll continue to measure and publish our performance against our targets on our website, as well as report our gender pay gap and gender bonus gap as part of our diversity pay gap report.
