Women in Finance

Our Pledges

Achieving diversity and balance of skills, independence and experience shall be the key determinant of any new appointment to your Board, Executive and Senior leadership teams where selection of the most suitable candidate will be paramount.

No candidate shall be discriminated against on grounds of gender, marital status, race, ethnic origin, colour, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, religion, age, social circumstances or any other factor.

When the Society signed up to the Charter in 2019, we set out, subject to the considerations above, to:

• maintain at least 33% male and at least 33% female representation at board level
• achieve and maintain a rolling average of at least 37% male and at least 37% female representation across the combined Executive and Senior leadership teams, by end of 2020.

Our Progress

Each year as part of our annual planning cycle we challenge ourselves to review our targets and, considering the progress made in 2021, where we improved our representation of females in senior leadership to 39.4%, we increased our target for 2022. At the same time, we updated the methodology for calculating the result to a point in time. The revised target was:

• to achieve 40% female representation in our senior leadership population by the end of 2022.

We are pleased to announce that at the point of reporting our results we had achieved this target.

Whilst we continue to make good progress in addressing the gender imbalance in our senior leaders, we still believe that there is much more to be done before we achieve parity, and we will maintain our focus on this key area until there is no longer under-representation of women in senior leadership.