Major banks in the financial district of London and finance firms are looking to bolster their ranks with top female coders, as part of a wider drive to change statistics that show women make up less than one fifth of those employed as computer programmers and software developers in the UK.
Lloyds and Starling Bank have become the latest major finance companies to actively search for female tech talent by partnering with Code First Girls – the UK’s largest provider of free coding courses for women. The firms join 26 other banks and financial services companies, including Black Rock, Morgan Stanley, NatWest, in working with the group.
Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls, said: “There is a glaring gender gap in both the tech and financial services industries, which becomes even worse when you look at senior teams. These industries are critical for the UK’s economic competitiveness and innovation, but they need to diversify to better reflect the UK and benefit from female talent.” Teresa Ng, Engineering Lead at Starling Bank said: “The more women we see recruit into tech and finance, the more girls and women will aspire to enter the sectors, dismantling stereotypes of tech and finance as a ‘male space’ and improving the outputs of these sectors overall.” Brailsford recently joined the Advisory Panel for the Women in Finance Charter – a commitment by HM Treasury and signatory forms to work together to build a better gender balance of teams in the finance industry. However, some of the financial districts leading female CEOs said that these initiatives lack energy, and that more needs to be done.
Amanda Blanc, Aviva Group CEO and Treasury Women in Finance Champion, said: “The Women in Finance Charter is now six years old and, in that time, the representation of women in senior management roles in financial firms has increased by just 1 per cent every year and in 2021 it was 0 per cent. Progress is just too slow.”
Alison Rose, CEO at NatWest, said: “There’s never been a more exciting time in the UK’s thriving technology industry, yet women are still seriously underrepresented. Despite widespread initiatives underway data shows that the number of women working in the tech sector has remained consistently low over the past decade.” She said this was in part attributed to less girls pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) subjects at school and a lack of female role models in tech.
Generally, across industry the gender pay gap remains at its widest for Britain’s oldest workers, new research shows. Rest Less, which offers advice to the over 50s said there was a 24 per cent difference between the median gross annual pay of full-time working men and women aged in their 50s, rising to a gap of 26 per cent for those over the age of 60.
Rest Less analysed pay data from the Office of National Statistics and found that in 2022, the biggest difference in full-time pay was between men and women in their 50s. Women aged 50 – 59 earned an average salary of £30,603 which was £7,274 less than men in the same age group who earned an average salary of 37,877.
Rest Less compared 2022 data with the previous 10 years and found out that while the national gender pay gap across all ages groups has narrowed from 24 per cent in 2012 to 19 per cent in 2022 – it remains at its highest for those in their 50s and 60s. Rest Less chief executive Stuart Lewis said the gap risked “devastating consequences” for women’s retirement provisions. (The writer is our foreign correspondent based in the UK)
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