Home About Progeny Women in Finance Charter

Women in Finance Charter

As a proud signatory to the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter, Progeny is committed to implementing the recommendations of the Charter which aims to encourage and support the progression of women in the Financial Services sector.

Woman,Entrepreneur,Standing,Beside,A,Window,In,Office.,Mature,Woman

Women in Finance

We know that our industry still has a long way to go to improve gender representation and pay equality but as a signatory, we are committing to driving positive change and we are pleased to share our annual progress report for 2024.

Our Chief Executive Officer, Neil Moles is responsible and accountable for equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at The Progeny Group. Neil is supported by a management board committed to advancing EDI.
Our target was to achieve 50% women in senior leadership by 31 December 2025. As of 1 September 2024, women make up 29% of our senior leadership. Female representation has fallen in the past 12 months, and we largely attribute this to M&A and restructuring activity together with significant headcount growth and organisational change.
As a result of the above factors, we have revised our target to reflect the changing dynamics of our company. Looking ahead, we have set a 40:40:20 target to be achieved by 31 December 2027. This ratio requires us to have a minimum of 40% women in senior leadership roles. The 20% part of our target can be represented by any gender and allows us to be more inclusive of non-binary identities.
Our commitments and targets are published here on our website, and we will continue to update our progress annually.

About Progeny

Background

In 2024, we acquired and integrated The Fry Group team – our largest acquisition to date and one that resulted in us becoming a global company. Later this year, we will welcome more team members from further acquisitions.

Merger and acquisition activity naturally affects the demographics of our team and requires us to review our management and governance structure as we grow. More recently, this has led to changes at our board and senior leadership level. Whilst it has resulted in a decrease to female representation at senior level compared to our results last year, we are confident that our people strategy will enable and support female progression to senior roles in the years to come.

Two,Happy,Business,Women,Of,Young,And,Middle,Age,Talking

Our progress

Each year, we set actions to support our EDI progress. Our actions are focused on hiring, promoting and keeping more women in our company.

NB – 1920 – Attitudes to retirement – Featured Image

The priorities we identified, and actions taken this past year include:

Embedding fair and inclusive hiring practices

We continue to evolve our hiring practices to ensure they are fair and inclusive. In the last 12 months, we have introduced a variety of testing tools to help us understand more about a candidate’s work style preferences. Our new recruitment system enables us to anonymise CVs, and we strongly encourage the use of diverse hiring panels.

Commitment to equal pay

This year, we published our gender pay gap report for the first time. While our results showed room for improvement, it is worth noting that gender pay gaps are a societal issue and not just a Progeny issue. We are fully aware of the challenges we are facing and remain committed to working with others in our industry and the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter to drive positive change. Based on our results, we have set an action plan to close the gender pay gap. As part of this plan, we will run our first equal pay audit next year.

Building an inclusive culture

It is important to us that our policies and initiatives advance EDI and support colleagues through different life stages. This is why we have made most of our benefits available to everyone from day one of their employment and have tried to ensure colleagues who join us through acquisition have access to the same or similar benefits.

We are in the process of launching a neuro-inclusion community alongside our other employee networks which include menopause cafes and a working parents’ community.

Nurturing our talent

Our colleagues’ development is important to us, and we are focused on ensuring everyone has equal access to oportunities. In the last 12 months, we have financially supported many colleagues through exams and qualifications. The uptake for professional study support continues to grow and we are delighted to see so many of our colleagues engaged in professional development and learning. We will soon be launching a new Professional Study Support policy providing greater levels of support.

Our Women in Business Forum, which is due to launch in September 2024, has been designed to empower our female colleagues in achieving their professional and personal goals, and to promote gender equality by raising awareness of the unique challenges women face in business. This employee-led forum will also work closely with senior leaders, sharing insights and feedback to the management board to advance equity, diversity and inclusion.

Raising awareness and embedding EDI

We have communicated our EDI strategy and launched a mandatory e-learning course to create a common understanding about EDI and explain the roles we all play in creating an inclusive workplace. Furthermore, we are introducing an ‘EDI Colleague Charter’ that sets out the expectations and responsibilities of all colleagues. This will be supported by a new EDI policy and Equal Opportunities policy due to launch in September.

We are committed to embedding EDI in everything we do, and this includes our M&A activity. Each time we welcome a team member via acquisition, we are mindful of the cultural differences that exist as we bring our teams together. It is important to us that differences are embraced and included, and further work is planned in the coming months to ensure we continue to raise awareness and embed EDI in our integration processes.

In Summary

Progeny is committed to the Women in Finance charter and will continue to place significant emphasis on strategies that advance equity, diversity and inclusion. We know there is work to do towards achieving a gender balanced industry and Progeny is proud to be part of a wider group of companies driving this important initiative which not only benefits our industry but our society.