Of the 157 Mortgage Solutions readers polled, 20% said they would not be in favour of implementing the Charter’s requirements* with 10% still unsure.
Getting on board with the Charter has been a positive way to mobilise support within the mortgage industry, Clare Jupp, director of people management at Brightstar said.
Jupp said she was shocked by the initial findings published in a report authored by Virgin Money’ chief executive Jayne-Anne Gadhia in March, revealing the under-representation of women at board level and within senior roles.
“While the Mortgage Solutions poll showed that around 70% of the industry supports the Charter, there are still people that don’t support those principles – well who are those people and why don’t they support it?
“This is not about positive discrimination, it’s about making sure you’ve got the best people for the job. It’s about making sure you’ve got opportunities for women to be able to develop and train and move into new roles. At Brightstar, we have an inter-management programme in place aimed at making sure that key female members of staff are given access to training so that they are able to progress. There’s so much wasted talent and potential out there and not every woman can come back to work full-time, but that’s not to say they haven’t got the skills or ability to do the job,” she added.
Andrew Montlake, director at Coreco, believes that attitudes within the industry have shifted significantly over recent years, leading to a boost of women in senior positions in financial services.
But he still thinks significant improvement is needed, particularly when it comes to recruiting female brokers.
“We’re starting to see more female advisers enter the market, but what we need to ensure as an industry is that there’s no glass ceiling for them so that they continue career progression and become the next business leaders for our industry.
“We try hard to make gender balance a key focus at our company, but you still walk into broker boardrooms and they’re all male.”
Tom Price-Daniel, director at Alderbrooke, an executive search firm which helps firms to meet their targets around gender, explained that it was important for companies to support and encourage women back into the workplace after taking time away from work, particularly after having a child.
“I don’t think women are put off from joining the sector, but there is a natural distribution curve that happens for women entering financial services. Institutions need to put in place policies that mean when women leave the workplace they are actually able to come back.”
Montlake said that employing an external female adviser to help Coreco shape its strategy has helped give the firm a better slant on how it operates internally and presents itself to customers.
“We wanted to have an outside voice to give us advice on different parts of the business like HR and marketing and it made sense to have a female opinion in the mix. That gives us a very different perspective on how we run our business and what we do, and as a result things have been a lot better.
“It’s good for anyone to get an outside opinion, but especially in a male-dominated business it’s helpful for that to be a female voice because it does help to change the dynamic.”
*Women in Finance Charter
Firms signing up to the Charter must pledge to:
- have one member of the senior executive team who is responsible and accountable for gender diversity and inclusion;
- set internal targets for gender diversity in senior management;
- publish progress annually against these targets in reports on the company website;
- have an intention to ensure the pay of the senior executive team is linked to delivery against these internal targets on gender diversity.
