RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Gender Diversity – what’s the problem?

Gender diversity, especially in the Financial Services sector, has rapidly emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing British business today. If the current rate of women entering the board room was maintained it wouldn’t be for another 65 years that there was even parity in numbers. Simply put by McKinsey recently in published research: Organisations with women in top management outperform those without. There are a plethora of other reasons too, why a lack of women is bad for business and in turn for the British economy, not least of which are competitive advantage and sustainability. Britain is, after all, completely reliant on our financial services sector in the global economy, and that is unlikely to change much to a meaningful degree, despite the backlash over the credit crunch and perhaps imminent legislation regarding banks.

There is work being done by many of the largest banks to try to deal with the issue, but recent figures from the Equality and Human Rights Commission make for alarming reading and if they are an accurate portrayal of our Financial Services sector, it might also give some clue as to what lies behind perhaps an even bigger challenge – that there is a growing lack of desire to take the top jobs in a vast majority of women in financial services.

We recently conducted Gender Diversity market research on behalf of one of the biggest global banks, to try to determine how big the problem was to them internally, but also on a much larger scale out in their market. One of the key findings was that only 9% of women interviewed even wanted executive level roles. At the risk of oversimplifying things, is that any surprise? You cannot pay a segment of your workforce on average 55% less than another segment doing the same job, particularly during and after a deep recession when millions of UK employees are looking for a deeper connection in their working lives and perhaps contemplating radical change.

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