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 strong target in order to accelerate progress on gender diversity. We can confirm that female representation on the board is currently at 27% and female representation of total senior management has increased to 31%. This is a good achievement for us and something that we will continue to focus on.

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

This is a journey and whilst representing good 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.

Supported by the Board, we have established a Diversity and Inclusion Working Group with clear strategic goals. The focus for 2022 is learning and raising awareness of broader diversity, which includes a calendar of events throughout the year. We 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 & 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.

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.