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Gender Representation

Progress to date

As of 30 September 2023, we are within our target to have 45-55% female representation at 51.6% in our senior leadership population (the top three layers of our organisation). We are also pleased to share that we have 57.1% female representation in our Executive committee. This is in line with our longer-term ambition to achieve sustained gender balance across all layers of our business.

Whilst this is a positive step, we need to maintain our focus on building a strong talent pipeline and ensure that our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategy is fully embedded in every facet and level of our business.

Accelerating progress

We have reset our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) strategy in 2023 and have four pillars that are central to our plans:

  1. Attracting, retaining and advancing talent
  2. Creating equity in the colleague experience
  3. Creating strong leadership accountability
  4. Building BRAVER (our allyship framework) into our Culture

The first two pillars within our strategy will enable the maintenance of gender balance longer term and promote Virgin Money as an employer of choice for a wide variety of people.

Our goal is to create a culture at Virgin Money where people can bring their whole selves to work and feel valued and respected. To do this successfully we have a further two pillars within our strategy that are central to this.

Firstly, we have a strategic focus on creating leadership accountability, this is critical for us at Virgin Money and we know it will drive clear action and better outcomes for colleagues, customers and our business.

The second area of focus on culture within our strategy is building BRAVER (our allyship framework) into our culture. this is our final pillar. During National Inclusion Week 2023 we launched our brand-new enterprise-wide allyship framework BRAVER.

Our goal in designing BRAVER was to create a sustainable way to drive a consciously inclusive and connected culture across our organisation and to support colleagues and leaders to feel empowered (and BRAVER) through a deeper understanding of DE&I, which will ultimately accelerate the pace of progress for Virgin Money.

Our commitment doesn't end here

We want to create a bank that is more representative of the communities we serve and we are working hard to attract and retain talent that will enable us to achieve this. Initiatives that are central to this objective are;

Our action plan

We’ve introduced bold commitments for recruitment suppliers requiring them to include diverse candidates on all selection lists. We also conducted a full review of our supplier base to ensure we are working only with suppliers who share the same ambition and passion for the topic of DE&I that we do.

We launched our Springboard programme last year which is designed for female colleagues to provide tailored support and take control of their own career journey. We’ve also introduced our Welcome Back programme to support colleagues’ returning to work after a period out of business.

This year, we introduced the EveryWoman learning platform to empower women and provide them with unique learning and development content to support personal and career progression.

Our new approach to work – A Life More Virgin

A Life More Virgin is designed to help those with caring responsibilities better manage their work/life balance. The proposition also enables us to remove geographical constraints to hiring which has enabled us to attract candidates from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Gender pay reporting

At Virgin Money Inclusion is central to our purpose, and that’s why we have been focused on tackling barriers to address the gender pay gap. We are pleased to share that year-on-year we have seen a reduction in both our mean and median gaps in 2023.

The majority of our colleagues are women and we are delighted to have strong female representation within our senior levels of leadership across the organisation. We know we’ve got more to do to help colleagues’ progress their careers and close the gender pay gap and we’re committed to doing this.

We have continued to gather insight and experience from our workforce to understand what the barriers are and how we can tackle them. As a result, we’ve introduced a number of initiatives, which you’ll be able to read more of in our Gender Pay report below.

When we first started publishing our Gender Pay Gap report seven years ago, we said at the time this was not the work of a moment. This remains true today. We are committed to maintaining gender balance at senior levels of Virgin Money, supporting careers and removing barriers to equity and advancement.