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. Once we 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.
We first achieved our target of 50% female representation in 2021 and continued to maintain this into 2024. In the latest reporting period of 1 September 2025, we are at 41% female representation in Senior Management. This is largely due to some colleagues being on maternity leave. If these colleagues were counted in this year’s data, our figure would be 48% - just one person off our 50% target. As a small organisation, our dataset is volatile, and one change of staff can disproportionately impact it. Nevertheless, we are committed to maintaining our 50% target.
The ABI’s current targets under the Women in Finance Scheme are as follows:
Overall target:
50% female representation in Senior Management. The next target review date will be 31 December 2027.
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 pleased to have maintained good overall progress since we signed up to the Charter, and are committed to re-achieving our target.
Along with our commitments to the WIFC, we have supported our 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
- Launching new policies including Carer’s Leave, Fertility and Menstruation & Menopause.
- 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 conduct 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.