This charter is a pledge for gender balance across financial services. It’s a commitment to work together, across our industry and with Government, to build a more balanced and fair financial services industry.
Organisations who sign the charter make a clear commitment to improve diversity, to ensure that women are able to progress into senior levels, to set targets to support this work and to regularly report on their progress. On 23 June 2020, Leek Building Society became an official signatory to the charter committing us to:
We’re committed to creating a diverse and balanced workforce because we know different people bring different ideas, skills and perspectives.
When we signed up for the charter in July 2020, we had 40% female representation within senior management. Over the last four years we have challenged ourselves to continually improve our employee proposition, and our practices to become even more inclusive.
We achieved our target of 45% female representation in our senior management team in April 2023 and broadly maintained this across 2024.
Maintaining a target of 45% is a challenging and ambitious target, well above that seen by many other building societies and signatories to the Women in Finance Charter. The nature of the small number of roles in senior management means that our female representation inevitably fluctuates within an annual period, and our current position is 35%.
In 2025, we reaffirmed our commitment to inclusion through a revised Inclusion Strategy, which includes supporting females. Our target remains at 45%, demonstrating a long-term goal based on genuine change. We will continue to review our approach to recruitment and talent pipeline development to enable sustained long-term change.
