Legal & General Release Their Gender Pay Gap Report

At Legal & General our purpose is to be economically and socially useful. We have long championed fair treatment for all our stakeholders including our employees. 

Our people are crucial to delivering this purpose. We have publicly committed to an ambition of 50 / 50 gender balance by 2020 - our gender pay gap shows that we have more work to do. As an employer and an investor, we think reporting on the Gender Pay Gap is a very positive step in helping to improve transparency to achieve greater diversity across UK businesses.

Combining all our UK employing companies as at 5 April 2017, our overall median gender pay gap is 31.6% - a long way from where we want it to be, but we are committed to making the changes necessary to reduce this gap.

WHAT SPECIFIC STEPS ARE WE TAKING TO REDUCE THE GAP?

Nigel Wilson, our CEO, has set out our aspiration to achieve 50/50 gender balance by 2020 and is a signatory to the 30% Club’s goal of 30% women on UK Boards and in executive leadership teams.   In 2016 we further strengthened our commitment by signing the Women in Finance Charter and set clear targets to improve our gender diversity in senior roles.  We are not where we want to be yet – but we will continue to work hard to create a more diverse and gender balanced organisation.  We are approaching this in a number of ways:

Senior leadership commitment

• We have visible and active Board support; culture and inclusion is a key focus for the Board
• Executive directors have specific culture and gender targets, which they work towards as part of their annual objectives
• We champion the achievements of our female role models – three of our seven business divisions are run by women
• We support high potential women to help accelerate their development through executive sponsorship
• We facilitate regular networking events for men and women to create momentum for change.

Changing the way we recruit

• We aim to have balanced shortlists and use diverse interview panels, to ensure a fair and inclusive interview process
• We expect our recruitment partners to engage and support our inclusivity plans and have recently selected new partners who have demonstrated their ability to source diverse talent
• Training is in place for interviewers, to focus on delivering fair and balanced outcomes for candidates
• We have unconscious bias training for all employees.

Creating a gender diverse talent pipeline

• We have mentoring programmes for senior women and our pipeline talent, including participating in the 30% Club’s cross-company mid-career mentoring scheme
• We are committed to having a gender balance when recruiting early career talent
• We analyse the proportion of men and women at different stages of the career journey and in different parts of the business and work to improve the balance at all levels through identifying key talent.

Creating a flexible, agile and supportive environment

• Wherever possible, we are creating an agile work environment. We provide the technology, support and training to enable people to adopt more flexible and empowering working practices.
• We have a programme of workshops available to our businesses to support working parents and carers. We also offer new parent coaching.

We know that these actions are an important part of reducing our gender pay gap. However, to step up our efforts to deliver change we are announcing the following four initiatives - we believe these will take us closer to our goal of reducing our gender pay gap.

• We will launch a new and improved suite of Apprenticeship and Graduate recruitment programmes for 2018 across all of our businesses
• We will implement an initiative for career returners aimed at attracting those who have taken a career break
• We will publish a Code of Conduct for our suppliers and partners which will formalise our expectations about gender diversity
• We will roll out a new and improved Talent Management approach designed to support the development of talented women and men in our business.