The culture shift to recruit and retain female talent

Financial Services lagging behind

2023 celebrated 50 years of female traders on the London Stock Exchange, a huge milestone. However, 2023 also sees women in finance suffering nearly double the wage disparity compared to the UK average. Recent gender pay gap data has shown that the share of leaders who are female across top financial firms sits at just 35%.

According to the Women in Finance report, of the 400 plus signatories signed up to the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter to improve gender balance in senior management, there have been improvements from 2021 to 2022 in every sub sector area, with the average levels of senior representation increasing from 33% to 35%. But advisers and asset managers have some of the lowest proportions of women in senior management, illustrated below, with the lowest levels of diversity targets across the sector. Being able to measure the gender diversity of customer-facing advisers, however, is tricky given that Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) titles do not contain a gender category to be able to measure.

A recent study found that only nine FTSE 100 companies were headed by women. 19 of the FTSE 100 are in financial services and, of the nine, there were four in this space.

Clearly, in the financial services sector, as career levels rise, female representation falls.

Combatting gender diversity through recruitment and retention strategies