The number of women on executive committees and boards in UK finance firms has grown significantly over the past five years, but there is still some work to be done, according to research.
In the five years’ since HM Treasury launched its Women in Finance Charter, female representation on executive committees across more than 200 financial services firms rose from 14% to 22%, and from 23% to 32% on boards.
Representation was even higher among the firms that signed up to the Charter, the research by think-tank New Financial found: 26% of executive committee members and 35% of board members are female.
Across the finance sector as a whole, the number of women in executive committee (exco) positions have increased 60%, and board members nearly 40%.
This data, presented in the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter five year review report, was collected from a sample of 205 companies from 12 sectors of the finance industry in May 2021 and compared with data from March 2016.
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The HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter was launched in March 2016 to encourage the financial services industry to improve gender balance in senior management. It now has more than 400 signatories covering 950,000 employees.
Yasmine Chinwala OBE, partner at New Financial and co-author of the report, said: “The five year mark is an opportunity to take stock of the progress of the Women in Finance Charter. While female representation is moving in the right direction, there is still a long way to go.
“The five big wins for the first five years of the Charter have been building a deep and wide signatory base, normalising the use of diversity targets, increasing female representation at senior levels, driving a shift in how diversity is viewed as a business issue, and ensuring gender diversity is a regular agenda item for excos and boards.”
Over the next five years, we need to move from talk to action, from working in isolation to working together, and move from a narrow perception of gender diversity to encompass women from every walk of life and every part of society” – Amanda Blanc, group CEO Aviva
She said the industry must take on tougher challenges if it is to maintain the pace of change over the next five years.
“The next areas of focus are shifting from recruitment activity to building a sustainable pipeline of female talent, cascading accountability from the top throughout the organisation, developing more women in revenue-generating roles and pushing the ambition of targets towards the ultimate Charter aim of parity,” Chinwala said.
The researchers also surveyed 134 signatories of the charter and found 56% felt it had driven permanent sustainable change in their organisations and 63% said the same for the industry.
Some 97% said their agenda to improve the representation of women at senior levels had advanced over the past five years.
More than 60% of signatories have a target of at least 33% women in senior management, and nearly 40% have a target of at least 40%.
Linking diversity targets to executive pay was identified as the most difficult of Charter principles to achieve, but 49% said the link to pay was effective in driving change.
Making a public annual update against targets is the only one of the four principles that has not shown clear improvement over the five-year period.
Amanda Blanc, group CEO Aviva and a government Women in Finance Champion, said: “Over the next five years, we need to move from talk to action, from working in isolation to working together, and move from a narrow perception of gender diversity to encompass women from every walk of life and every part of society. That won’t be easy and it is every signatory’s responsibility to make it happen – but that is why the Charter exists.”
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David Duffy, CEO of Virgin Money, urged companies to make roles more flexible at all levels. “Many businesses have gone a long way in improving their hiring practices and company policies to build more inclusive environments, but following the pandemic and the lessons we have learnt about the future of work, there is an opportunity to go further, faster.”
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