Women in Finance Charter

Our commitment is underpinned by both our targets and a range of actions that we have put in place to support women to take up more of our senior management roles globally, which is just one element of our diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.

In the last year, we have grown as a Group and seen an increase in the proportion of female employees across the group during the time we have been members of the Charter. Since we signed up to the Charter in 2016, our female senior management population has grown from 23% to 27%, but we want to do more.

Last year we decided to increase our target to a minimum of 40% of women in our senior management population to reflect our growth ambitions and our desire to attract, develop and retain diverse and talented colleagues united by a common purpose. In support of this challenging ambition, we will be introducing new initiatives in addition to those in place already which are detailed below, and we also want to take the opportunity to review the timescale by when we will aim to achieve the new target.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are vital for a successful business, and we recognise that everyone is different, and value our people for the individual contribution they make. We know that diversity in our business enhances our performance and helps us to grow to give. We encourage our people to use their experience, ideas and their unique character in their work.

Fairness and equity are already important principles that are built into our culture, and the way we work, we support all our employees in reaching their potential.

We do however see that there are some opportunities for us to improve our approach and here are some examples of the actions in our plans:

• We provide development and stretch challenges to enable our female talent to reach their potential.
• Our dedicated Women’s Network group offers peer support, allyship and personal development opportunities. 
• We ensure 50:50 gender representation onto our leadership development programmes including the Benefact Leadership Development Programme and Benefact Emerging Talent Programme. 
• Our flagship Women in Leadership programme is specifically targeted at developing senior female leaders to reach their potential.
• Our Inclusive Leadership programme ensures all our managers, Executive Committee and Board lead in inclusive ways.
• We support people to grow their careers through our General Insurance and People Leaders Academies, as well as supporting a whole range of technical and qualification-based training.

• We continuously monitor gender within our performance moderation, pay and bonus processes.
• We benchmark all our roles every year to ensure that we are paying an appropriate market rate for each job. 
• We undertake a range of measures to uphold high standards of fairness in the ways we reward our people. 
• We proudly support parents through our parental leave benefits through things like competitive maternity, adoption, shared parental and paternity leave and pay.