Women in Finance Charter – Gender Diversity Plan 2022

Gender Diversity Plan

Bruin recognises that diversity is imperative to all workplaces and is proud to pledge our support for gender balance across financial services.

Our Gender Diversity Plan is a public commitment to maintain strong gender balance across the talent pipeline, proactively manage gender pay equity, effectively implement gender equality policies and practices, and foster an inclusive workplace culture with high engagement levels of both the male and female employees.

We intend to do this by providing the correct training, mentoring and empowerment to enable women to take on senior roles both within our organisation, and in the wider financial services sector by supporting our clients in meeting their gender diversity objectives.

Our Gender Diversity Plan therefore covers both internal and external processes. Our internal plan is a framework for our own operational practices set out in seven phases, and our external plan outlines our commitment to supporting our clients’ diversity objectives.

Internal Gender Diversity Plan

Phase 1

Strategic decision-making must lay out a new vision, embracing diversity as a competitive advantage, and allocating the necessary resources to effectively implement new policies and initiatives.

Phase 2

Establishing an Inclusion and Diversity Committee (IDC). This committee will be under the leadership of our Managing Director, the senior executive accountable for gender diversity. The IDC will include members of both tactical and strategic levels from across the company. Among the responsibilities of the IDC will be the outlining of the company’s strategies, policies and practices aimed at managing diversity.

Phase 3

The IDC will be responsible for managing the laying out of policies and practices that aim to improve gender balance, to include:

  • establishing a talent pipeline strategy and ensuring that our external recruitment partners for internal hiring are fully briefed and aligned with our goals.
  • engaging in thoughtful and courageous approaches to flexible work arrangements and other family-friendly policies;
  • elimination of the pay and career-progression gaps.
  • linking of variable executive pay through performance review objectives or balanced scorecard.
  • achieving 30% representation of women in middle management roles by 2022 (our Board is currently 2:1 male to female, and our senior management team is 50:50 male to female).

Phase 4

Implementing, communicating, monitoring and evaluating of the work done by the strategic and tactical levels. The IDC and Board will ensure the support of line managers and supervisors, who will be in charge of ensuring the proper execution of practices and policies, and of course, front line employees, who will actually be executing these.

Phase 5

Communicating the company’s commitment to gender diversity. All of the efforts and the commitment to gender diversity policies and practices should be communicated, both internally and externally.

Phase 6

Making gender diversity accountable. At this stage, the IDC will begin conducting periodic evaluations of the policies and practices implemented thus far, assessing their impact on gender balance. This evaluation will include quantitative and qualitative metrics, such as measures of women’s rate of attrition, employee climate surveys, and training assessments.

Phase 7

The IDC team, in coordination with the board of directors, senior managers and other key stakeholders, will meet periodically to review the diversity mission, policies and practices against their specific goals.

 

External Gender Diversity Plan

We are committed to the following targets for gender diversity in support of our clients’ objectives:

  • We will commit to providing clients with a diverse shortlist of candidates and aim for at least 30% of applicants to be female
  • We will educate our new and existing clients about the importance of gender diversity, the need to close the gender pay gap and the Women in Finance Charter
  • We will empower women to apply for jobs they may not have been confident enough to apply for by providing necessary and relevant advice and guidance during the recruitment process
  • We will educate our company’s wider network of the importance of gender diversity and equality in via our social media channels and other platforms