Research shows that having more women at senior levels leads to greater diversity of thought which – in turn – improves employee engagement, innovation and decision making. Making sure that we have women at the top of our bank will bring clear advantages for our business performance.
Currently, around one in three of the 5,000 most senior roles across RBS are held by women, but we know we can do better than that. Our new goal is to have at least 30% of our top 600 roles held by women by 2020. This is an ambitious target in itself, but we’re challenging ourselves to go even further: this target will not be an aggregate across the bank. We want to achieve it in each of our business areas in order to drive the benefits a better gender balance will bring.
To prove the seriousness with which we’re taking this target, we’ve decided to make our gender target a formal objective for our Executive Committee. Have no doubt; this is important to us. Over the longer term, we’re aspiring to achieve 50/50 gender balance at all employment levels by 2030.
Having a clear plan to ensure the right balance of diversity makes good business sense and is an important part of changing the culture of the bank.
I imagine people might say that this won’t make a difference but that’s not true: research shows that organisations with greater gender diversity outperform organisations that are not gender diverse by 15%. Diversity means something different to everyone but at RBS we like to think of it as making sure we’re looking out for all of our customers. We know that people have different ways of thinking and by including a diverse range of people in decision making we can make sure we develop products and services that work for all of our customers. This is another step towards being a bank entirely focused on customers.
