AFME is proud to have signed up to the Women in Finance Charter.
The Charter aims to improve gender balance at all levels in financial services, with a particular focus on senior management.
By signing the Women in Finance Charter, AFME has pledged to:
- set a target of 30% female representation in senior management by January 2021;
- publish annual progress against this target on our website;
- have a member of our senior executive team who is responsible and accountable for gender diversity and inclusion; and
- have an intention to ensure the pay of the senior executive team is linked to delivery against these internal targets on gender diversity.
Beverley Vince, HR and Operations Director at AFME said: “We are proud to be joining many of our member firms in signing up to the Women in Finance Charter. The number of women at board and executive committee level is gradually improving in European financial services, although there is still much work to do in boosting female representation. We believe that being more representative of society brings benefits across the board, from better workplace culture through to improved financial performance.”
2022 Update:
In September 2021, AFME renewed its pledge to continue to work towards a target of 30% female representation at a senior management level by 31 January 2024. Following a concerted drive to increase women in senior positions in the company in 2022, we have increased our senior female representation to 25% from 22.2%.
Through planned and diverse interventions we continue to work towards our target of 30% female representation. This target is based on a more long-term approach, developing diversity in the talent pipeline and promoting from within, where possible. In the coming year we will be focussing our activity in the following areas:
Recruitment: In 2022 AFME partnered with an in-house specialist recruitment company to support in meeting our hiring needs. We have adopted technology based recruitment and the new methodologies will help AFME to hire exceptional candidates from a wider range of backgrounds. We have implemented new processes to attract diverse talent, minimise bias in the assessment process, and increase the diversity of hires. In 2023 we will develop recruitment metrics with a view to introducing key performance indicators to both monitor and improve the diversity of our new hires.
We have made a significant investment in building our early career offering at AFME by expanding the Graduate programme, clarifying career pathways, and improving learning and development opportunities.
Behaviour and Culture: We are continuing the drive to build data on the representation of diversity in AFME’s female population, tracking representation by gender, ethnicity, and disability, as well as tracking internal people changes e.g. promotions and lateral moves in addition to leaver statistics and external hires.
Conferences & Events: AFME has increased our target representation of women keynote speakers, moderators and panellists at our Events from 20% to 30% and in 2022 we achieved a 29% female representation. We are committed to creating events that promote a diversity of thought and elevate the voices and the talent that exists across the diversity of people within our industry and the Events team actively work with business leads to identify women speakers, with relevant experience, raising awareness with our sponsors.