As the United Kingdom still struggles with board diversity, some new studies are emerging.
New Financial, a think-tank set up in 2014, this month published Women in UK Financial Services 2016: Putting the Gadhia Review and HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter in Context. In July 2015, the economic secretary to the Treasury, Harriett Baldwin, invited Virgin Money CEO Jayne-Anne Gadhia to lead a review of women in finance to try and solve a number of diversity problems in the industry. On 22 March, the Ghadia Review into the representation of women in senior managerial positions in financial services was published. New Financial provided the data for the Gadhia Review, whose major recommendation was “that every financial services firm operating in the United Kingdom be encouraged to publish its own inclusion strategy and targets on an annual basis—and that progress against these internally generated targets be reported.” The report also recommended a series of positive actions that firms could take. These are shown in Box 1.
