Diversity and inclusion

In September 2020, the LME signed the Women in Finance Charter, reinforcing our commitment to gender diversity across the LME Group.

At the date of signing, 31.9% of senior management roles across the LME were 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 to date

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 2022, this number has risen to 35.4% (an increase of 2.1% YoY). We believe we are on track to meet our Charter target of 40% of women in senior management positions by the September 2025 deadline.

We continue to work on five key areas to drive a more balanced representation of women across our senior management roles – attraction, governance, benchmarking, retention and education.

• Attraction: Encouraging a diverse range of applicants through our inclusive recruitment process remains a cornerstone of our attraction strategy. We continue to build a strong and diverse junior talent pipeline though our apprenticeship programme, which is entering its second term – attracting candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. Our first cohort of apprentices, who joined in 2020 (two women and two men), are graduating from the programme and moving into permanent roles across the business. Our latest intake of apprentices is made up of three women and one man – all of whom will be enrolled on the two-year programme, with the goal of transitioning into permanent roles afterwards.
• Governance & benchmarking: Our senior management team are accountable for ensuring we hit our representation goal for women, and each function has a specific diversity and inclusion (D&I) objective against which performance is formally measured. We continue to report on our progress towards the 2025 target on a quarterly basis, for full transparency.
• Retention: For the past three years we have been active members of the 30% Club cross-company mentoring programme for high potential women, with currently six mentors and six mentees across the organisation. We have also developed a gender-balanced succession pipeline, and continue to drive forward our D&I Forum initiatives, including a new parental leave “buddy programme”, helping new parents transition back into working life following a prolonged period of absence.
• Education: In an effort to ensure that LME employees understand the importance of diversity and inclusion, we have rolled out unconscious bias training to all staff and incorporated it into our new joiner induction programme. Over the past 12 months, our D&I networks have also continued to raise awareness and drive engagement through events, speaking opportunities and regular internal communications.

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 year ahead.

30% Club cross-company mentoring

The LME is taking part in the 30% Club cross-company mentoring programme. This programme provides women with the opportunity to enter into a mentoring relationship with more senior individuals from outside of the LME, with the aim of providing additional personal development.

The 30% Club cross-company mentoring programme is the world’s largest cross-company mentoring programme, having supported more than 9,000 mentors and mentees since its inception in 2014.

Diversity and Inclusion Forum

The LME is committed to creating an inclusive, supportive and open environment for all of its employees. Our forum, sponsored by our LME Clear CEO, aims to drive forward initiatives to recruit, develop and engage employees from the greatest possible pool of available talent in order to ensure that our business can benefit from a cross-section of experience, ideas and knowledge. Our employee-led diversity and inclusion programme is aimed specifically at ensuring that all employees are able to thrive at the LME.

Internal networks

To ensure we are hearing everyone's voice and to make people aware of the different perspectives we have at the LME, we have a number of employee networks that are employee-led. These groups include:

• LGBTQ+ Network
• Gender Diversity Network
• Race and Ethnicity Network
• Social Mobility Champion Group
• Disability and Mental Health Champion Group

The LME’s apprenticeship programme is designed to introduce recent school-leavers to the fundamentals of working in the commodity-trading sector and within a recognised investment exchange (RIE). It encourages applications from under-represented groups in our industry and in doing so is building a diverse junior talent pipeline for the LME and the sector more broadly.

Our apprentices will gain experience across the operations function within the LME while also studying for a CISI investment operations certificate. We currently have four apprentices enrolled on the programme, who will potentially stay on at the LME in junior roles or may move on to a member firm at the end of their two-year LME placement.

If you are interested in finding out more about our apprenticeship programme and how to apply, please contact our Resourcing team at recruitment@lme.com.

Since 2018, the LME has published its Gender Pay Gap Report, and we are pleased to do so, as we believe that the transparency created through gender pay gap reporting is a critical tool in understanding, managing and addressing perpetuating gender equality issues. We are also voluntarily reporting the figures for LME Group (the LME and its clearing house, LME Clear), which aligns with our commitment to transparency in our efforts to bring greater gender equality to our business and the wider industry.

LME Gender Pay Gap Report 2021 - published April 2022 (PDF)

LME Gender Pay Gap Report 2020 - published April 2021 (PDF)

LME Gender Pay Gap Report 2019 - published March 2020 (PDF)

LME Gender Pay Gap Report 2018 - published April 2019 (PDF)

LME Gender Pay Gap Report 2017 - published March 2018 (PDF)