Women in Finance Charter

The Charter is a financial services initiative to build a more balanced and fair industry, promoting gender balance at all levels across financial services firms. It involves a range of commitments which will be reported on the HM Treasury website.

Diversity is important to us at Ecclesiastical. 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 business performance and we encourage our people to use their experience, ideas and their unique character in their work.

Fairness and equality are already important principles that underpin our working practices, and we support all our employees in reaching their potential.

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

How we recruit and attract employees

• Review our candidate communications to more clearly communicate our commitment to gender diversity.

How we develop our people and support them to grow

• Provide the development and stretch challenges, to enable our female talent to reach their potential.
• Support people to grow their careers through our General Insurance and People Leaders Academies.

How we approach remuneration and managing performance

• Continue to enhance gender monitoring within our performance moderation, and pay bonus and review processes.
• Continue to enhance gender monitoring of remuneration packages at recruitment and promotion.

How we consider the health and safety and wellbeing of our people

• Ensure the continued excellence and employee awareness of our suite of flexible working and family-friendly policies.
• Support our employees to build their own resilience enabling them to better manage both workplace and personal challenges.

Our commitment to the Women in Finance Charter is underpinned by our 2020 target. In 2018 we introduced a new target, focused on our commitment to support women to take up more of our senior management roles globally.

As part of the Women in Finance Charter, we set ourselves the target that by 2020 women will make up at least 30% of our senior management group. We believe supporting women to develop throughout their careers is key and we continue to work towards enabling women to make up 30% of our combined senior management group.

We set ourselves a deliberately challenging target in order to accelerate progress on gender diversity. When we signed up as one of the founding signatories of the Women in Finance Charter, women made up 23.3% of our senior management group globally. Four years on, we are delighted to say over 32% of our senior management roles globally are filled by women and 27.3% representation at board level. This is a fantastic achievement for us and something that we will continue to focus on.

This is a journey and whilst this represents excellent progress so far, we’re keen to build on the firm foundations we’ve achieved so far by supporting a more diverse population into senior management roles in the future.

Some of the key steps we’ve taken since becoming Charter members include:

• Clearly setting out and embedding our commitment to diversity within our target culture model and Code of Conduct, as well as on our careers pages
• Enhancing how we gather and report data – including in our Annual Report and Accounts
• Enhancing diversity e-learning for all employees and running unconscious bias training for all managers
• Providing leadership development and stretch challenges to enable our female talent to reach their potential through our Ecclesiastical Leadership Development Programme
• Supporting people to grow their careers through our General Insurance and People Leaders Academies
• Continuing to enhance gender monitoring within our performance, pay and bonus processes, and reporting on our Gender Pay Gap ahead of the required deadline.

There is no simple answer to creating a better gender balance in our organisation. So the solution will also require a range of actions taking effect over the medium term.