Hear from COO Trish Houston
Publishing our gender pay gap is key to holding ourselves to account on our work to create a fair, inclusive and diverse workforce. We welcome the call to publish this information as we strive for transparency around a topic so core to our long held values of Better Together and Make Change Happen.
The past five years have seen us take bold and purposeful steps to drive our 134 year old culture forward to one which is fit for the future. We have invested heavily in our people, and consciously looked outside the existing talent pools to bring in people who can enrich our workplace and client experience. Whilst our work is far from done, we are delighted with the change we have made happen in the gender composition of our business at every level.
Our representation of women at senior levels continues to be a clear differentiator in our industry. In addition to the retention of our 1st position rank in the FTSE Women Leaders Review for the financial services category, we were named runner-up for the inaugural INSEAD Alumni Balance in Business Awards and shortlisted for the Organisational Award for Supporting Diversity in the Women in Pensions Awards.
This year and next, people will see the consequence of a material change in our remuneration policy flow through the bonus pay gaps in particular. In 2019/20 we introduced a number of incentive schemes which align the interests of our people with the interests of our shareholders over the longer term. This means that significant proportions of the senior teams’ reward is deferred over three or more years. This coincided with a shift in our gender demographic at the senior level, which means that the women in our leadership team will see their first deferred bonus and LTIP paid in 2024, while several of the men who have been with us longer had deferrals mature in 2023. This was compounded by the value of these payments reflecting a movement in share price from award price at the beginning of the pandemic of £5.87 in March 2020 to a realised price of £8.22 in March 2023, this has widened the bonus gap this year. We remain confident that we have a positive story to tell around our gender pay gap and more broad diversity figures, and that these payment timing issues will right themselves following the 2024/25 bonus payment cycle.
View our summary document here.
