UK CAREERS | DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION | WOMEN IN FINANCE

At Santander, we aim to be “the place to be yourself” and have the most inclusive culture for our people, and to reflect the customers and communities we serve. Signing the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter is one way we show our commitment to gender equality, as well as our aim to increase transparency and accountability.

As signatories, we have set an ambitious target to have 38% (+-10%) women in our senior roles by the end of 2026. As of September 2024, we have reached 34.5% female representation. This is an increase of 7% from the 27.5% representation we had when first becoming signatories in 2016.

While we’ve made significant progress, we need to move faster if we’re to achieve our ambition, and we’re taking steps to accelerate our progress through four key priority areas:
 

1- Talent and performance 

We ensure all our bankwide talent programmes are intersectional, meaning we ensure participation from underrepresented groups at least in line with our ambitions or UK averages as part of our aim to represent the customers and communities we serve. For gender, this means women make up at least 50% of our Accelr8, Black Talent and Mobilise (Social Mobility) development programmes.

Our bespoke Women in STEM programme is helping us tackle underrepresentation in this key growth area both at Santander and in the workforce more broadly, with sponsorship from existing senior leaders as a key enabler of tangible development.

2- Recruitment

To position ourselves as an inclusive employer of choice for women through our focus on gender equality, women’s health and family support. and improve recruit process to create better outcomes.

We’re proud to be one of a small number of organisations to share our family friendly policies publicly and include full information on our progress in our Everyday Inclusion Report and on our website. This includes information on our Pay Gaps, and actions to address, but goes further to include information on representation and employee experience. This is linked to our aim to be transparent and ensure we’re held accountable for our actions to help drive us towards Gender Equality.

We continue to monitor outcomes for women at all stages of recruitment, with our data showing no bias against women at any stage in our recruitment process, and overall, women achieving outcomes in line or in excess of their male peers. This is a result of many actions, including our commitment to gender balanced interview panels, equal shortlists, and unconscious bias training for all hiring managers before interviews commence.

We are expanding our approach to particularly focus on Women In STEM to address the underrepresentation in these roles in our organisation and within the UK Workforce more broadly. Our Women in STEM recruitment campaign is focused on highlighting the existing role models we do have, and our dedicated support for helping to shift the dial, particularly through our Women In Stem Leadership Programme.

Santander UK is the lead sponsor of HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter, furthering our commitment to increasing gender diversity internally and in the wider financial sector. The Charter looks specifically looks at to building a more balanced and fair industry.

3- Culture and inclusive behaviours 

To build on our inclusive culture with a focus on specific actions to improve experience and outcomes for women.

Our work towards having an inclusive culture for women is shown in our metrics:
Our people tell us we have an inclusive culture, and our women regularly score us hire than our male counterparts. In our key diversity and inclusion metric from our ‘always on’ employee survey, women score us as 9/10 (0.3 higher than their male peers).

4- Customers and Community

We’re committed to advancing female entrepreneurship in the UK, Santander Breakthrough women business leaders’ mentoring programme, through this, we’re very proud to have again delivered our annual Women Business Leaders’ Mentoring Programme, powered by Moving Ahead.

In addition to the traditional mentoring, we also provide a Beyond Mentoring approach which looks at practical skills to help business owners grow their business. This takes into account current issues, for example, the cost-of-living impact on small businesses & the importance of being a sustainable business amongst our overall business support. Through this programme, we have now supported over 800 Women Business Leaders through a nine-month mentoring programme in the past four years.