President’s Message – October 2022

Given how much is going on at WIBF, it’s easy to become caught up in the ongoing slew of activities. Aside from the upcoming launch of the latest report in our Accelerating Change Together programme, “100 Diverse Voices: The Future of Work”, and the national 24th Awards for Achievement being celebrated on 17th November, we are also developing our communities, which each focus WIBF’s overarching mission (helping women progress careers in financial services) for the select group of individuals involved. The Future Leaders Network, launching on Thursday 3rd November, is a fantastic example of the support we deliver to help ambitious women advance, on top of their current employers’ patronage.

In taking a step back, we can examine change to date and October, the start of a new WIBF financial year, is a good time to do this. The numbers, however, show just how limited that change is.

A report, Women Count 2022, by The Pipeline consultancy highlights this for FTSE 350 firms. 96% of CEOs are men, as are 74% of executive committees. 10% of companies have no women on their executive committees. More worrying for me was that the path to becoming a CEO continues to be dominated by men – they account for three out of four executives working their way up to that key role.

In financial services, the progress is as “glacial” of that noted in the Women Count report. The latest statistics we could find highlight that women only make up about 9% of London’s 650 top investment bankers, 12% of UK fund managers, 16% of regulated financial advisers and 17% of FCA-approved individuals. Some of these numbers may be out of date, but given 41% of firms signed up for HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter didn’t even meet their commitment to submit data on time…

The Women Count report details the impact the lack of diversity has on the UK economy. It’s losing billions because of gender imbalance. While not mentioned per se, it’s easy to see the UK financial services sector will also be losing billions given it contributed 8.3% of the UK’s total economic output in 2021.

So, at a time when economic growth appears to be stagnating, isn’t this a time for fresh thinking? We have lots of ideas, but please get in touch via the operations team if there is an approach you or your firm has taken that could benefit more women and push percentages higher.

Thank you,

Anna Lane