Continuous robust female representation in ICAEW’s senior roles

The Women in Finance Charter

More than 400 organisations including banks, insurance companies, investment firms and accountancy practices have signed up to the charter since its launch in 2016.

Signatories commit to supporting the progression of women into senior roles in the financial services sector by focusing on the executive pipeline and the mid-tier level; to set targets in line with this aim and to publicly report their progress in meeting those targets.

ICAEW’s targets

When we signed up to the Charter in 2017, ICAEW female representation in senior leadership was 33.6%, our target was 40% to be achieved by March 2020. We exceeded this target in 2019 and as of 2025, we have 57.8% female representation in senior management.  
  
ICAEW understands the value of diversity to decision-making and innovation. To deliver against our new strategy – Direction 2030, we must attract and retain talent, removing barriers to equality. We actively pursue gender diversity across all areas of our organisation and have progressed significantly against our targets on gender diversity for senior roles since signing the Charter as well as reducing our Gender Pay Gap by 10.7% since 2017. We recognise there is more to do in this area as small changes can dramatically affect the gap.  

Continued support

We review our targets annually, considering representation among the wider ICAEW workforce. We continue to support our female junior talent as part of succession planning, by offering a broad range of training, coaching, and mentoring opportunities.

Furthermore, we continue to build an ever-more inclusive organisational culture where employees can thrive irrespective of their background or characteristics.

Finally, we take an evidence-based approach to continuously advancing our policies in line with our employees’ needs. This includes ensuring the impact of women’s health issues are minimised at mid-career stage, and flexible and hybrid working arrangements that enable employees to balance work and family responsibilities more effectively. We have enhanced our provisions beyond statutory in our maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption leave. We actively encourage partners to take up shared parental leave.

The activities listed below seek to both increase gender diversity at senior levels and further narrow our Gender Pay Gap.

ICAEW’s gender diversity initiatives

In 2011, we created the Women in Leadership training programme to support women aiming for senior management, partner or board roles. The programme is designed to empower women to harness style of leadership that is already within them, and bring it powerfully to the fore, to help their organisations prosper. While mainly targeted at ICAEW members, we reserve a few spots for female employees in leadership roles.

In October 2023 we launched a new programme – “Elevate” – for directors and above, which includes a two-day offsite residential workshop on inclusive leadership. The course ran over multiple weeks and covered a variety of topics such as chairing meetings, stakeholder engagement, credibility and impact, and strategic planning.

ICAEW is committed to being inclusive employer and improving employment practices, we annually, externally, benchmark its activity within the sector using the comprehensive toolkit and survey of ENEI (the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion). We measure our, diversity data monitoring, strategy and planning, DEI training, inclusive leadership, inclusive recruitment, talent management and development, working practices, employee voice and engagement, values and behaviours and wellbeing and belonging. For our activity we received a prestigious ENEI Silver inclusive employer award in 2025.