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.

Our commitment to the Women in Finance Charter is underpinned by our targets.

We set targets to focus on our commitment to support women to take up more of our senior management roles globally.

We believe supporting women to develop throughout their careers is key and we continue to work towards enabling women to make up a minimum 30% of our combined senior management group. We continue to challenge ourselves to achieve and increase on this target.

We set ourselves a deliberately challenging target in order to accelerate progress on gender diversity. We are pleased to confirm that female representation on the board has increased to 33% and 28% of total senior management. This is a fantastic achievement for us and something that we will continue to focus on.

Since last year, we have seen an increase in the proportion of female employees across the group. Overall there has been a reduction in the number of senior leaders of which there has been a marginal decrease in the number of senior female leaders. Other than the positive steps we are already making as detailed below, we intend to present these findings across the business so that awareness is increased.

This is a journey and whilst representing 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.

Diversity and inclusion are 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 equity 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:

• Review our candidate communications to more clearly communicate our commitment to gender diversity.
• 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.
• Establishing a Diversity and Inclusion Working Group and refreshing our plans to continue to raise awareness about diversity and inclusion in our business and develop our inclusive culture.

• 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.
• Providing leadership development and stretch challenges to enable our female talent to reach their potential through our Ecclesiastical Leadership Development Programme.

• 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.
• Enhancing our support for parents through our parental leave benefits – increasing our maternity, adoption and shared parental pay, and doubling paternity leave and pay.
• Continuing to enhance gender monitoring within our performance, pay and bonus processes, and reporting on our Gender Pay Gap ahead of the required deadline.
• Enhancing how we gather and report data – including in our Annual Report and Accounts

• 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.