We strive to ensure that all of our customers and staff feel valued and included. Accordingly, we closely monitor our staff gender balance and focus on ways in which we can adapt our recruitment, training, benefits and employee support mechanisms to help us achieve our aim of increasing female representation at senior management level.
In June 2017, we became a signatory to the Women in Finance Charter, a government-led initiative designed to encourage gender balance across the financial services sector.
By signing up to the Charter, firms:
When we signed the Charter in June 2017 we had a 28% female representation in senior management, and last year we were pleased to report that we had far exceeded our original Charter target with 37.1% of our senior management being female.
We have since narrowed our definition of the senior management population, as well as setting a new, more ambitious target. Our aim now is that 35% - 40% of our Senior Management will be female by the end of 2023.
As of June 2021, we have 26.8% female representation at senior management level. We believe we are on track to meet our Charter target by our deadline, and will be continuing with our efforts to attain that level.
We have enhanced our maternity, paternity and shared parental leave pay policies, and refined our maternity buddy scheme.
Our annual leadership development programme continues to offer our pipeline of female senior managers the opportunity to develop.
We have been training managers in interview techniques designed to reduce the likelihood of unconscious bias by managers who recruit ‘in their own image’.
The aim of gender pay gap reporting helps organisations understand the size and causes of their pay difference between men and women in their organisation and identify any issues that may need to be addressed
Key initiatives from our 2020 report