Addressing gender balance
HMT Women in Finance Charter
Our gender action plan
What we’ve done in 2022-2023
- Recruitment: Through a combination of technology partnerships, and practices, we have a framework in place to help attract more women into roles in our business. Including ensuring diverse shortlists for roles, using augmented writing software for job adverts, running returnship programmes.
- Development: We have introduced development offerings for women at early, mid and senior career stages.
- Data: We promote accountability by providing leaders with increasingly detailed data on gender representation and report our progress against targets publicly.
- Capability: We have taken actions to address gender-related barriers to career progression, such as buidling our Career Framework, and by creating safe spaces to share and learn.
- Colleague support: Our Balance colleague network provides support and runs sessions on topics such as mental health, imposter syndrome and career progression.
- Policy: Our benefit polices are gender inclusive, including equal parent leave in the UK.
Our progress as at 31 December 2023
Our targets
1 out of 3 of our 2025 gender targets met, and on track for the remaining 2
34%
2022: 39%
44%
2022: 61%
43%
2022: 43%
2021: 46%
3.9%
Reductions in our mean and median pay gaps and our median bonus gap
Supplementary gender data
Middle management: 37%
Non-managerial positions: 45%
Measuring our impact
- A global leaderEquileap has named us a global leader for our UK equal parent leave policy
- Continued recognitionWe’ve been included in Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index every year since 2018, and have the highest percentage of female fund managers in companies of our size (Citywire Alpha Female report 2021 and 2022)
- Setting standards
Our company was among the first signatories to the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter in 2016 – demonstrating our commitment to inclusion and diversity, and pledging to increase gender balance in our senior management populations and across our industry
Gender pay gap
We report our UK gender pay gap each year. The gender pay gap is the difference in the average pay of men and women and a measurable indicator of gender equality in an organisation.
| 2022 | 2023 | |
| Mean gender pay gap | 28.7% | 24.8% |
| Mean gender bonus gap | 46.2% | 55.3% |
In 2023 we saw reductions in our mean and median pay gaps and our median bonus gap. We have reduced our pay gap each year since 2018, with a cumulative reduction in our mean pay gap of 14.9 percentage points. Our mean bonus gap has increased this year, however we’ve had an overall reduction of 13.8 percentage points since 2018. We are moving in the right direction, but progress will require our continued focus and tangible action, which we are committed to. For this reason, we committed to a collective target through our partnership with the Diversity Project, to reduce our industry gender pay gap by 50% by 2030.
Balancing gender representation is key to creating an inclusive culture, and has the potential to improve company profitability by 25%[i] and boost the global economy by $12 trillion[ii]. COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted women[iii], meaning the need for a gender inclusive workplace, free from systemic bias, has never been greater. We remain committed to making sustainable progress on gender equality in our organisation and across our industry.
More information on diversity, equity and inclusion at abrdn
Learn more about our abrdn employee networks.
Our approach to addressing ethnic minority under-representation.
More on our approach to partnerships and measuring impact.
How we aim to improve social mobility outcomes at abrdn.
Find out more about our diversity, equity and inclusion framework and targets.
Find out more about how we're implementing diversity, equity and inclusion into everything we do at abrdn.