Within our senior management cohort, female representation has gone from 21% to 27%, and our graduate intake has gone from 26% female to 34%. The direction of travel is encouraging, but we are far from satisfied. Diversity will remain a key pillar of the Bank’s strategy. Our goal is to attract and inspire the best people to public service. We want people with diverse ideas, willing to challenge and debate, and we want them to feel empowered at all levels, to take the initiative. To support these objectives, we have introduced diversity targets that for the first time are reviewed and challenged regularly by Court. We have two Bank-wide targets for gender. The first is for 35% of our senior management staff to be female by 2020; a two thirds increase from its 2013 level. The second is to have an equal split of men and women in the organisation at all levels below senior management by 2020 (from our current 44%). But achieving these goals isn’t just going to happen. It requires: •  Focussed recruiting  •  Active mentoring  •  Consistent and comprehensive performance management, and  •  A flexible work environment that values diversity of thought  Today, each division of the Bank knows where it stands and has plans in place to improve, where necessary. So in this sense, the Bank has implemented two of the Report’s recommendations. The Bank has also recognised the importance of executive accountability for diversity, another key recommendation of Jayne-Anne Gadhia’s report.
Third, the disruptive possibilities of the fintech revolution are beginning to touch the core of the financial sector. Now it is time for a similar transformation of the diversity of one of the most important sectors of the UK economy. In many respects, Jayne-Anne Gadhia’s report is long overdue. For too long the representation of women in middle and senior tiers of management has lagged that in other leading sectors. For too long, results have fallen short of good intentions. And for too long the financial sector has suffered the economic consequences of this inequality while society has borne the broader costs. Greater diversity – in all its forms, cognitive, gender, background, ethnicity, religion – can help transform the financial sector. Research has shown that companies with a significant proportion of women in senior management positions perform better in part because of some leadership behaviours that women exhibit more consistently than their male colleagues. 1 In particular, women are found to excel at people development, participative decision making, presenting a compelling vision and acting as role models – all drivers of financial performance. 2  1  http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters. 2  https://hbr.org/2012/03/a-study-in-leadership-women-do. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Research on board membership has also shown that female directors enhance board independence, partly because women bring different perspectives and networks to the table, and partly because they are more likely to ask difficult questions.