HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter was launched in 2016 to build the pipeline of female talent for leadership positions, and now has reached 141 signatories.

Initiatives, such as succession planning, examining hiring practices and unconscious bias training, are helping to make these firms more female-friendly, and should help them attract and retain talent.

Over two-thirds of signatories either have used, or are considering using, the Charter as a blueprint to improve the representation of other diversity characteristics in their firms too, such as ethnicity and sexual orientation, with PwC claiming that the Charter is already driving stronger executive accountability for both their gender and ethnicity targets.

Jayne-Anne Gadhia, CEO of Virgin Money, and government’s Women in Finance Champion, said: “I’m delighted to see such strong progress being made by the financial services sector. Embracing diversity not only improves productivity and business performance, it is quite simply the right thing to do.”

The Charter sits among a set of wider government reforms to improve gender equality in the work place. These include the £5 million fund for ‘returnships’ announced at Budget

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