business people in a meeting

Addressing gender balance

HMT Women in Finance Charter

We’re committed to achieving gender balance at all levels of our organisation and have been working towards this goal for a number of years. We believe that being transparent about our actions will help to improve progress in our business and across our industry. We’re addressing this through our gender action plan, by setting targets and through our pledge to the HMT Women in Finance Charter.

Our gender action plan

Our gender action plan is designed to improve how we attract, retain and enable women to progress their careers at abrdn. It has actions targeting early, mid and senior career stages.
Our diversity targets

What we’ve done in 2022-2023

  • Recruitment: Through a combination of technology partnerships, and practices, we have a framework in place to help attract more women into roles in our business. Including ensuring diverse shortlists for roles, using augmented writing software for job adverts, running returnship programmes.
  • Development: We have introduced development offerings for women at early, mid and senior career stages.
  • Data: We promote accountability by providing leaders with increasingly detailed data on gender representation and report our progress against targets publicly.
  • Capability: We have taken actions to address gender-related barriers to career progression, such as buidling our Career Framework, and by creating safe spaces to share and learn.
  • Colleague support: Our Balance colleague network provides support and runs sessions on topics such as mental health, imposter syndrome and career progression.
  • Policy: Our benefit polices are gender inclusive, including equal parent leave in the UK.

Our progress as at 31 December 2023

Our targets
Gender targets met

1 out of 3 of our 2025 gender targets met, and on track for the remaining 2
34%
Women at senior leadership

2022: 39%
44%
Women in graduate intake UK

2022: 61%
43%
Women in global workforce

2022: 43%
2021: 46%
3.9%
Reduction in mean gender pay gap

Reductions in our mean and median pay gaps and our median bonus gap
Supplementary gender data
Percentage of women in the following populations:

Middle management: 37%
Non-managerial positions: 45%

Measuring our impact

  • A global leader
    Equileap has named us a global leader for our UK equal parent leave policy
  • Continued recognition
    We’ve been included in Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index every year since 2018, and have the highest percentage of female fund managers in companies of our size (Citywire Alpha Female report 2021 and 2022)
  • Setting standards

    Our company was among the first signatories to the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter in 2016 – demonstrating our commitment to inclusion and diversity, and pledging to increase gender balance in our senior management populations and across our industry


More about partnerships and measuring our impact

Gender pay gap

We report our UK gender pay gap each year. The gender pay gap is the difference in the average pay of men and women and a measurable indicator of gender equality in an organisation.

  2022  2023 
Mean gender pay gap  28.7% 24.8% 
Mean gender bonus gap  46.2%  55.3% 

In 2023 we saw reductions in our mean and median pay gaps and our median bonus gap. We have reduced our pay gap each year since 2018, with a cumulative reduction in our mean pay gap of 14.9 percentage points. Our mean bonus gap has increased this year, however we’ve had an overall reduction of 13.8 percentage points since 2018. We are moving in the right direction, but progress will require our continued focus and tangible action, which we are committed to. For this reason, we committed to a collective target through our partnership with the Diversity Project, to reduce our industry gender pay gap by 50% by 2030.

Balancing gender representation is key to creating an inclusive culture, and has the potential to improve company profitability by 25%[i] and boost the global economy by $12 trillion[ii]. COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted women[iii], meaning the need for a gender inclusive workplace, free from systemic bias, has never been greater. We remain committed to making sustainable progress on gender equality in our organisation and across our industry.

More in our latest abrdn UK gender pay gap reportOpens in new window
[i] Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 25% more likely to experience above average profitability (Source: ‘Diversity wins’ – 2020 McKinsey and Co). [ii] $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality of participation (Source: ‘The Power of Parity’– 2015 McKinsey and Co) [iii] McKinsey Global Institute – COVID 19 and gender equality: Countering the regressive effects (July 2020).

More information on diversity, equity and inclusion at abrdn

Learn more about our abrdn employee networks.

Our approach to addressing ethnic minority under-representation.

More on our approach to partnerships and measuring impact.

How we aim to improve social mobility outcomes at abrdn.

Find out more about our diversity, equity and inclusion framework and targets.

Find out more about how we're implementing diversity, equity and inclusion into everything we do at abrdn.