Tue, September 04, 2018
“Diversity among City partners growing at a snail's pace”
Financial Services (including the investment management) already faces challenges relating to the perception that its culture may impede a women’s success in the industry. Perception accounts for much of why financial services organisations have a hard time retaining women. Until that perception is dislodged nothing will change. These findings, dare I say - substantiate the scale of the challenge ahead for the industry to be authentically inclusive. The problem is not hiring women, the challenge is in retaining female talent and preventing the creation of plateauing careers.
While the Gender Pay Gap has help to push for better reporting of female pay - The industry clearly needs to do more to retain and progress the pipeline. For example firms may need to look at the benefits of offering a more agile working environment to help women (and men) stay in the industry. They will need to take on-board the needs of millennials (estimated to be the largest component of the future workforce) who are less motivated by financial reward than previous generations. In addition, the levels of sexual discrimination experienced and/or witnessed by women in financial services will only serve to perpetuate the bias that industry is not inclusive.
At Ocean we are acutely aware and well versed with the challenges the investment management industry faces in retaining and progressing talented women across all levels within investment management firms. We are proud that we made good progress in helping firms recruit female talent, in fact 59% of the people we placed were women in relation to men. 70% of our Director level appointments were women and 67% of our Associate level appointments. We have proven that it is possible to identify, engage and attract female talent when applying commitment and focus. The industry clearly needs to innovate and adopt more inclusive recruitment practices to "...move away from hiring from internal networks that favour make candidates". We have a developed an inclusive recruitment paper looking at the biases that exist within the recruitment process. The paper includes organisational recommendations for firms to adopt.
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