The Women in Finance Charter is a Government initiative which commits firms to setting, measuring and reporting against targets to improve the number of women in senior roles.
We were one of the first signatories to the Women in Finance Charter (WIFC) in 2016 (when our representation of women was sitting at 36.96%) and had originally set a 3-year target to achieve 45% female representation within our senior management population by 30 June 2019. Having achieved this, we subsequently strengthened our target to set a more ambitious goal of 50% female representation, and also significantly narrowed our internal definition of senior management.
As at 1 September 2023, we have achieved our goal of 50% female representation in Senior Management.
The ABI’s current targets under the Women in Finance Scheme are as follows:
Overall target:
Achieve 50% female representation in Senior Management by 31 December 2024
Supporting targets:
- Aim to maintain an over 50% rate of internal promotion into senior management positions.
- Request a 50%/50% gender diversity split in long lists provided by recruitment agencies during senior management recruitment processes.
- At least 50% of ABI colleagues to return from maternity leave / shared parental leave, and all flexible working requests considered in line with best practice.
- Provide equal opportunities for training and development to both male and female colleagues, including mentoring.
We are delighted to have made such strong progress since we signed up to the Charter, and, along with our commitments to the WIFC, have supported this progress with a plethora of inclusion work including:
- Advertising the vast majority of our roles as open to job-share, flexible and part time working.
- Refreshing and improving our flexible and hybrid working policies – and launching a new Carer’s Leave policy.
- Revamping our recruitment processes to mitigate unconscious bias, including utilising “blind” shortlisting software and introducing scoring metrics for fair and objective interviewing.
- Providing more transparency around our internal promotions process and improving our performance review process and how we do development discussions.
- Launching an internal mentoring scheme.
- Monitoring our progress and identifying actions for improvement through engagement surveys, and our own recruitment and colleague inclusion data.
You can read our DEI Strategy in full and view our inclusion metrics here.