Women made up 24.7% of new senior leader appointments in the UK’s financial services industry in 2024/25, according to an analysis of 28,000 senior leadership appointments over the past five years.
The proportion of female senior leaders appointed in financial services has declined marginally for two consecutive years, falling from 25.5% in 2022/23 to 25.2% in 2023/24.
“We need to stop pretending that the lack of women in senior leadership is a pipeline problem,” said Michelle Hartley, founder of HR consultancy People Sorted.
Hartley explained to HR magazine: “Women aren’t suddenly running out of talent, ambition or capability on their way to the boardroom. They’re running into systems that weren’t designed with them in mind.”
Researchers also found that women accounted for 14.2% of newly appointed CEOs and 20% of newly appointed CFOs in financial services in 2024/25.
Leadership consultant Katie Allen argued that most organisations are informed about barriers facing women in the workforce, including the gender pay gap and the “motherhood penalty”, but few businesses are “prepared to take that academic understanding and have the truly uncomfortable conversation about what that means in practice in their business”.
“This is usually because it will involve taking accountability for processes and behaviours that are undesired, and ultimately change will be required,” Allen told HR magazine.
According to Hartley, one of the biggest barriers facing women is how organisations define leadership potential, adding: “Too often, we’re still rewarding visibility over impact, confidence over competence and traditional career paths over diverse experiences. When senior leaders keep appointing people who look, think and behave like themselves, nothing changes.”
“HR has a responsibility to challenge this, not simply report on the numbers,” Hartley said. HR can do this by “examining who gets access to career-defining opportunities, who receives sponsorship rather than just mentoring, and whether promotion and succession decisions are genuinely based on evidence rather than familiarity and unconscious bias”.
Allen added that rather than putting effort into creating specific women’s leadership development pathways, she would like to see HR professionals find the root causes of where leadership pathways in their business are not fit for purpose, and “the ways in which they don’t take into account the needs and experiences of people of all genders.”
But HR cannot fix this alone, Hartley pointed out, suggesting that senior leaders need to be “accountable for the decisions they make, the talent they develop and the opportunities they create”.
“Gender equality won’t happen because another organisation launches a women’s leadership network or publishes a glossy diversity report, it happens when the people holding power are prepared to change how that power is shared,” Hartley concluded.
Representatives of Fox & Partners analysed Financial Conduct Authority data (year ending January 2025), examining 28,000 senior leadership appointments in the financial services sector over the past five years, including 1,380 appointments made in the last year.
To read original article click here