In October 2020, the LME signed the Women in Finance Charter, reinforcing our commitment to gender diversity across the LME Group.
As of August 2020, 31.9% of senior management roles across the LME are held by women. Our target is to increase this to 40% by September 2025.
The LME’s gender diversity strategy consists of five key pillars: attraction, governance, benchmarking, retention and education. Internal initiatives within each of these pillars will support the LME in achieving its five year target of growing our female representation across senior management positions. These include:
- Participation in cross-company and internal mentoring programmes for high potential individuals
- Internal education programmes, including unconscious bias training
- Gender-balanced succession planning and recruitment process
- Sponsorship and apprenticeship programmes – encouraging applications from under-represented groups
- Active cultivation of workforce diversity, supporting and further embedding existing internal staff networks – including the Gender Diversity Network
- Regular reporting of progress against our commitment to the Board of Directors and Executive Committees
Update on our progress – one year on
When we signed up to the Women in Finance Charter in September 2020, we had 31.9% representation of females across our senior management positions (SVP and MD level). As of 30 September 2021, this number has risen to 33.3%. We believe we are on track to meet our Charter target by our 2025 deadline.
Over the past 12 months we have made significant changes across our business in order to drive a more balanced representation of women across our senior management roles, focussing on five key areas – attraction, governance, benchmarking, retention and education.
- Attraction: We have introduced a blind CV approach to minimise risk of unconscious bias during the hiring process, as well as the launching our apprenticeship programme, encouraging diverse candidates and partnering with our members to build out women in trading roles.
- Governance: Our senior management team are accountable for ensuring we hit our female representation goal, with a specific D&I objective against which performance will formally be measured this year for the first time.
- Benchmarking: We carry out a quarterly review of gender balance across LME Group and individual functions, in order to identify issues early and take measures to drive change.
- Retention: We are enrolled in the 30% Club cross company mentoring programme for high potential women and continue to build out our Learning & Development offering, with a focus on ensuring diverse participants.
- Education: We understand the importance of educating our employees on the topic of gender diversity and diversity & inclusion more broadly, and rolled out Unconscious Bias training to all staff in 2021. We have continued to build out our internal networks to raise awareness, drive engagement and build support network through events, speakers, experience sharing opportunities.
We continue to work closely with our colleagues to ensure we foster a culture of inclusion across the LME and look forward to progressing further towards our Charter targets in the 12 months ahead.
