Women in Finance Charter
FSCS is proud to be a signatory of the Women in Finance Charter, promoting gender diversity in financial services.

To drive our progress towards gender parity, we ensure that we measure the number and percentage of women at all levels of the organisation. We are proud to have achieved an increase of 24% in our first two years as signatories of the charter, already exceeding our goal of 50% women in leadership in the organisation by 2022.
Increasing the representation of women in senior roles remains a key priority for the 2020s. Data has provided evidence to support the premise that people who differ from one another in gender, ethnicity or other characteristics bring a diversity of perspectives to an organisation which in turn enhances creativity and lessens group-think scenarios. Studies on females in management have shown that women in leadership provided organisations with greater innovation and increased growth.
To enable the organisation to leverage the above it was agreed that an equal split in the management population would provide the required diversity of thought, skills and innovation required to meet the challenging new strategy for the 2020s. We have introduced gender diverse recruitment panels and deliver unconscious bias training for all staff. A female-specific leadership programme and new career pathway process was implemented in 2020, to equip female employees with the skills and abilities to progress into leadership roles.
When we signed up to the Charter in February 2018, we had 33% female representation. As of September 2023, we have 45% female representation in senior management.
We have increased our female representation in our Executive Team to 80% and our Board to 75% making them predominantly female. Our Executive and Board representation exceeded the 50% target. Our overall female representation is 45%, falling just short of our ambitious target.
We believe being bold and brave in our targets and actions is the way to achieve change, so we will continue to push for gender representation within our Senior Leadership Community.
As part of the charter, we have committed to the following internal targets for gender diversity. We are currently reviewing these and we are working on new targets for 2023.
- 50% (+/- 5%) women in senior management roles by December 2022, which we achieved. To ensure we maintain this, our new target is to maintain 50% (+/- 5%) women in senior management roles by December 2024.
- 50/50 gender split (equal numbers of female and male candidates) shortlisted for all vacant roles.
- Increase female representation within IT and data teams to 20%.