Back

Women in finance

We've signed up to the Women in Finance Charter, which demonstrates our commitment to gender equality and supports our belief in diversity of thought.
A woman smiling and writing in a notebook. In the foreground a man is sat facing her

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

As part of our annual planning cycle we challenge ourselves to review our targets. We made some great progress in 2022, where we improved our representation of females in senior leadership roles from 39.4% to 40%; this resulted in the decision to increase our target again for 2023 to 45%. Again we have surpassed our expectations, achieving 46.1%, which has prompted us to set another revised target for 2024.

The revised target was:

  • to achieve 50% female representation in our senior leadership population by the end of 2024 - so gender parity in our senior roles. This will continue to remain our target as that is what we would like to achieve.

At the point of reporting, 19th December 2024, we are currently at 45.9% representation. As the senior colleague population is small, any change can impact the percentage significantly. We will report after 31st Dec 2024 to show the correct representation in line with the target set and update this information.

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.