The Women in Finance Charter Taskforce has published a series of powerful recommendations to speed-up gender equality amid painfully slow progress within the financial services sector.
Women in Finance champion Amanda Blanc warned it could take 30 years to reach gender parity if current progress is maintained, but working “quicker and harder” and adopting these significant changes could cut this to ten years.
The recommendations include mandating diverse shortlists for senior positions with 50% female representation, removing male biased recruitment advertising, having zero tolerance for harassment in the workplace, and detailed diversity targets.
Blanc’s comments follow the release of a report from Women in Finance which shows the slow progress of women into senior roles across financial services.
The report’s key finding is that women in senior management roles increased by just 1% between 2018 and 2020 – from 31% to 32%. It says at this rate, it will take financial services another 30 years to achieve gender parity at senior levels.
Blanc (pictured), who is also chief executive of Aviva, said: “Progress towards gender equality in the financial sector remains frustratingly slow. Women, companies and society cannot afford to wait 30 years when we can achieve this in 10.
“We’ve got to work quicker and harder, for the sake of women, for the sake of society and because a more diverse business is a more productive and innovative one.
“Our recommendations provide real life examples of best practice and a set of clear actions to guide us all towards gender parity.”
Monitoring and representation
The report also shows the overwhelming majority (91%) of firms surveyed do not monitor for unintended penalties from flexible working such as proximity bias and only 18% operate a career breakers programme.
According to the findings, 94% track and report female representation in senior management, 32% have a real-time dashboard with gender parity targets at executive and board level meetings and 68% do not have female representation on all promotion committees.
Just 18% audit performance reviews for bias, 36% have an inclusive meeting protocol to ensure the right people are at the table and to get rid of group think, and only 20% of surveyed signatories offer sponsorship programmes to senior women.
In response to the findings the Women in Finance Charter Accountable Executive Taskforce has worked with Bain Capital on a series of practical recommendations to accelerate gender equality across the sector.
They include:
- mandating diverse shortlists for senior positions with 50% female representation
- greater use of psychometric testing
- removing male biased recruitment advertising
- ensuring diverse interview panels
- starting women at the top of pay scales for new roles
- mid-career returners programmes to help women move back into work
- publishing bonus payments of senior members of organisation
- advertising all jobs as flexible
- having a formal sponsorship programme for women at all levels
- offering full pay equal parental leave, childcare facilities, and benefits packages that support women at key life stages (eg menopause)
- introducing reverse mentoring
- championing senior female role models
- funding and support women’s networks
- having zero tolerance for harassment
- having detailed annual gender representation targets for all parts of the organisation
- having gender parity targets embedded into KPIs scorecards for all senior management
- having a real time dashboard to showcase progress against gender targets accessible to the public