Industry outlines actions on closing gender pay gap

Wednesday 6 May 2020 

While the gender pay gap reporting deadline has been postponed for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, gender equality and closing the gender pay gap remain high on investment managers’ priorities, as the Investment Association (IA) today publishes a new report showcasing investment management industry initiatives on tackling the gender pay gap.

The report ‘Addressing the Gender Pay Gap: Industry Initiatives’ outlines three areas: attraction and recruitment, retention and advancement, and measuring and monitoring, where firms can do more to address the gender pay gap, and offers practical industry solutions, including:

• Implementing diversity policies for the recruitment process and ensuring the industry is known and understood by the public. Insight days, graduate fairs and partnering with third parties can play a crucial role in raising awareness of the value and purpose of the industry, supporting its ability to reach a more diverse pool of talent. Gender-decoding job descriptions and anonymising job applications can also support firms addressing biases that can impede women from entering the industry. At entry-level, this could also include apprenticeships, internships and graduate scheme targeted at diverse groups, including women.
• Introducing policies and programmes that act as incentives for women to stay within a company, such as: parental leave policies that encourage more paternity and shared parental leave uptake; returner programmes that provide placements which integrate mentoring and training for people returning from a career break; and women’s networks for women to share experiences, celebrate success and drive strategies to improve gender diversity.
• Improving understanding of where the industry currently is in terms of its gender pay gap and where it needs to be, through the capturing of diversity data, and setting clear targets for the representation of women at senior levels and the percentage of women coming through as entry-level hires.

Chris Cummings, Chief Executive of the Investment Association, said:

“During these difficult times, investment managers like many firms have rapidly and successfully moved to agile working. We know firms that embrace a flexible working culture are more attractive to a greater diversity of people, so we must build on this success and continue to embrace this flexibility as we recover from this crisis.

“This flexibility will also help address our gender pay gap. While closing the gender pay gap won’t happen overnight, our industry is not slowing down its efforts to tackle it. We know more must still be done, but the positive actions like the ones outlined in our new report will go some way to addressing, and ultimately closing, the gender pay gap.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

1. The full report, ‘Addressing the Gender Pay Gap: Industry Initiatives’ can be found here.
2. The Investment Association published its 2019 gender pay gap voluntarily in February 2020, which can be found here.
3. The IA is a signatory to the Women in Finance Charter and a member of the Diversity Project.