Treasury minister doing ‘deep dive’ into City diversity

Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative party conference yesterday (4 October), the treasury’s economic secretary John Glen explained that he wanted to see greater progress in diversity at financial services firms.

According to The Times, he explained: “I’m doing a deep dive into individual firms to say, what are you doing to move from a situation where you have 50:50 [gender split] recruitment at a graduate level or intake level, but over the course of the next 20 years, by the time you get to senior management and board appointments, you’ve certainly not got 50:50.”

Glen said some solutions included mentoring, sponsoring and “better interventions” to help women along that career path. He added: “There are good practices but it’s not universal good practice and my job is to try and swing light on that to get more progress in this area.”

His comments came on the same day that Reuters published analysis that suggested, while major banks made a slight dent in their gender pay, there’s still a long way to go. Collating pay gap data from 21 major financial institutions, the outlet found the industry’s mean average gender pay gap went down by just 0.4 percentage points to 33.4% in the year to April 2020.

Banks alone had a pay gap which narrowed by one percentage point, meaning the average gender pay gap for all UK employers in the year ending April 2019 was 14.6%.

Commenting on the news, the Chartered Management Institute’s chief executive Ann Francke, told Reuters: “The UK’s financial services industry has often been singled out. It really does have to get its house in order - the industry is a huge employer in the UK and it has a real opportunity to lead by example.”

To celebrate diversity, Credit Strategy hosted the Women in Credit awards took place last week, to see the full list of winners, click here.