With the ‘buddy’ networking system still in force, the chatter slowly ebbed away as Victoria Hartley, contributing editor of Mortgage Solutions, set the scene.

“The rallying cries to dig deeper and push harder in DE&I [diversity, equity and inclusion] are all around us. From Paloma Faith and Lily Allen’s too-familiar press interviews on the destruction that having babies caused their respective careers as single mothers – to chair of AMI Andrew Montlake at the AMI dinner giving the room a proper telling off in fact for claims he’s heard from this industry that DE&I is over or has already achieved its aims from certain elements in our industry.

“I’m hugely looking forward to today’s programme, with a raft of excellent speakers who I’m willing to bet will shake out any confusion over how much further we all have to go,” she said.

 

Virtue signalling: opening doors or an empty gesture?

The event opened with a debate entitled Modern diversity and inclusion initiatives enable companies to virtue signal through superficial actions. The audience was gathered around the ‘fishbowl’ on the pros and cons of corporate virtue signalling, with the speakers facing each other in a central circle to encourage audience interaction.

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William Lloyd-Hayward, group chief operating officer and managing director at Sirius Finance, who moderated, laid the groundwork by offering the definition of corporate virtue signalling as: “Expressing moral values to gain social approval or demonstrate one’s own righteousness.”

He said: “Some argue that virtue signalling is a positive, as a way to raise awareness [of] important issues, encouraging others to take action.”

Sim Sahota, business development manager (BDM) at Barclays Bank, said: “Is virtue signalling a bad thing? For me, the answer is no. The important thing is acknowledging something so it can be addressed. At least the door is open slightly and gives the opportunity to open the door wider with further discussion.”

“I’ve learned over the years, particularly working with clients and candidates, words are okay, but it’s actions that matter. What are you demonstrating through your actions rather than what are you proposing through words?” he added.

Moderator Lloyd-Hayward said as a gay man, he had never advocated that his company change its logo during Pride Month and has always been more interested in the positive action his firm has taken over the other 11 months of the year.

Sahota credited Sidney Wager, mortgage intermediary partnerships director at Barclays, and his wider team for setting an authentic and inclusive tone and stirring up the right energy and sustaining it within the bank.

Sahota said: “So by coming down from the top, it’s filtering through. It’s allowing us to have those open conversations with each other, creating that safe space, allowing us to then further that by having those conversations with our customers.”

He added: “So we’re finding that it’s working, but it’s a work in progress. There’s still more work to be done.”

 

The value and use of forensic data

The debate moved on to the assertion that data collection and benchmarks are a way to keep focus, drive diversity and inclusivity work onwards and understand the progress made so far.

Pete Gwilliam, director at Virtus Search said industry data is both incomplete and imperfect as few have delved into the full intersectionality picture.

But he urged the room to seek out gender pay gap data, which will exist. “Please go and look into it because [there] doesn’t seem to be this appetite for [the data] to be universally shared and universally talked about. And I suppose my point about measurement is that it’s the most reliable measurement index there is at the moment on a diversity scale,” he said, adding it has moved on very little in seven years.

The speakers agreed that benchmarks are very useful to create a picture of where the problems are but they need to be underpinned by the right spirit and behaviour to create change.

Rachael Edwards, senior policy adviser at AMI, said its D&I Viewpoint survey gave the industry a chance to take a close look at itself on paper for the first time.

“The Viewpoint did a really good job of showing that people had a really negative view of [diversity and inclusivity] in the financial services sector, and we just weren’t where we needed to be.

“People didn’t feel safe talking to their employers. And we will be running D&I Viewpoint again this year to see what we have done in the last couple of years. But it kind of only highlights today where the problems are. It’s not going to solve the problem for you,” she added.

 

Mentoring: creating a pathway to success

Edwards flagged another key industry obstacle to progress – the lack of ongoing professional mentoring to sustain continuous progression.

“There are a lot of women and people of colour that are promoted to senior roles in firms. But there’s no support network and the culture of the firm is exactly what it was prior to that person being hired. So the point [is] that these roles are maybe being held for the first time and often senior management roles, and then [people] are just kind of left to flounder and then that will be used as rationale that ‘we don’t need to hire women’,” she said.

Much as the regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), is trying to drive change, its processes continue to hold some back, it was asserted. The rigorous nature of the regulator’s authorisation process for senior managers continues to put many off who can’t rely on an experienced network of experience and support.

One speaker said: “The actual process of being authorised by the FCA is really scary. And if you don’t have somebody that’s going to mentor you through the process, you’re just not going to put yourself forward for it. So we constantly see the ceiling and see management where there isn’t as much diversity as there should be, because the process is actively keeping them away.”

 

The impact of burnout

Our speakers also touched on the fact the ongoing process of working on DE&I initiatives takes time and awareness that the more you learn, the bigger the subject becomes.

Edwards said: “I think one of the issues that is leading to this fatigue is that we’ve opened the door for so many D&I conversations.

“We’re not just talking about gender equality these days. We’re talking about LGBTQI and people from ethnic minorities but we’re also talking about parents with neurodiverse children and on it goes.

“And I think a lot of people that entered into this D&I space really try and keep their finger on the pulse of all of these and it becomes very quickly overwhelming, and it can be really difficult to see the progress and that’s when you start to get people burning out and they just don’t want to contribute to the D&I space anymore. And it’s completely understandable.”

Edwards said a key thing to learn is that you can’t champion everything, but you might be able to find someone who will take a niche area and leave it in safe hands.

She added: “You do need to try and fight your way through the fatigue. You just need to try and find another like-minded person that’s willing to sit in the trenches with you. And I think that’s what’s going to really make the difference is when you realise you don’t have to do this by yourself.”

 

This was just a flavour of some of the many highlights of the debate.

A huge thanks to speakers Jennifer Nursiah, partner at Coreco Group, Pete Gwilliam, director of Virtus Search, Rachael Edwards, senior policy adviser at AMI, Sim Sahota, BDM at Barclays Bank, Will Lloyd-Hayward, group CEO and managing director at Sirius, and our audience for their contributions.

 

Good intentions vs intentional action

Pauline Miller, chief equity officer at Dentsu International and former head of talent management at Lloyd’s International, led the workshop entitled: Bridging the gap from good intentions to intentional action.

Miller began by raising the spectre of self-appointed anti-DE&I spokesperson and Tesla CEO Elon Musk because his deliberate attempts to undermine affirmative action in the US are starting to ripple across to the UK.

“Elon Musk really is a very clever man and decided that diversity schemes are discriminatory.”

She said the challenges to affirmative action in US colleges have worked after intervention from the Supreme Court blocked these ring-fenced places at both Harvard and Harford in North Carolina.

“And what we are seeing is corporations then stepping back and going: ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have women’s programmes or maybe we shouldn’t have mentoring programmes. Maybe we shouldn’t because we don’t want to be opened up to litigation’,” she added.

The trend to pull back on the positive action of many UK corporations is gathering pace, she says, with schemes shut down or targets changed to ‘aspirational targets’ and diversity goals disappearing from company reports. Against the backdrop of the cost-of-living crisis, this is a dangerous position to be in, she added, especially when leaders want fast returns on their money.

“You have to revisit the why,” says Miller. “And so the first thing that we have to do is we have to slow that journey down. We have to be able to show why we’re doing this and what that long term looks like.”

For the statistics, Miller says she draws on the McKinsey reports, now running for 10 years, for figures on the mammoth productivity increases DE&I could drive. Both female and racial diversity in executive teams appear to show an increased likelihood of above-average profitability. Companies in the top quartile for both gender and ethnic diversity in executive teams are on average 9% more likely to outperform their peers.

Conversely, those in the bottom quartile for both are 66% less likely to outperform financially on average, up from 27% in 2020, indicating that lack of diversity may be getting more expensive, according to the report: Diversity Matters Even More: The case for holistic impact.

 

Miller’s strategies to avoid DE&I burnout and ensure the long-term health of your business

· Do an employee survey, be ready to listen to what your employees tell you and use anonymous case studies to make the business case for change. Be ready to upgrade your policies to answer the problems raised

· Create short- and long-term career pathways to help people rise through your business

· Set up employee DE&I networks allowing people to talk, raise issues and feed back to company management

· As an individual and to de-stress, ensure you have your own non-judgmental network of people you can discuss DE&I issues with and ask for feedback

· Be kind to yourself. It’s a marathon, not a sprint

 

Key event takeaways

• Always return to the ‘Why?’ Use data (in-company or external) to make the business case for continuous DE&I change and focus and company out-performance
• Be ready to change company policy to combat the problems employees raise
• Fight off burnout with a combination of personal support networks, delegation and ‘being kind to yourself’

 

The DIFF is a network that aims to discuss and promote key ideas and activities to create a more balanced and fair mortgage industry.

If you would like to become a member, please get in touch with iain.cartlidge@ae3media.co.uk for more details.

For all the coverage of our events and a raft of DE&I material, join our LinkedIn group.