Women in finance | Canada Life UK

Gender balance and inclusivity

As a Women in Finance Charter signatory, we’ve pledged to build a fairer and more balanced workplace. While a balanced workforce is good for our business, customers, and workplace culture, it’s also simply the right thing to do.

Advancing gender balance at all levels

"We aspire to enhance gender balance at Canada Life and empower all colleagues to achieve their full potential. We seek to support each woman in pursuing her career path in the best way for her. I’m delighted with the launch of the new career programmes and policies which aim to break down any barriers to progression and will aid retention. We have taken steps towards achieving our women in finance charter targets and continue to advance with interventions that embed inclusive behaviours, enhance our supportive culture and deliver change.”

Lindsey Rix-Broom, CEO Canada Life UK

Creating a culture of support

Today, there are still too many obstacles facing women in the workplace – especially within financial services. But by fostering a culture of flexibility, shared vulnerability, active listening and supportive leadership, we believe we can make an impact.

From beginning a career, to gaining confidence and progressing to roles with greater responsibility, our goal is to remove barriers and empower women through setting well-defined internal goals, providing mentorship, and welcoming mothers back into the workforce.

Our target

In 2023, we set a revised target of having women in 35% of our senior leadership roles by the end of December 2025. At the end of August 2024, we had women in 32% of our senior leadership roles and believe we are on track to achieve our ambition. This is an increase from 24% when we first signed the charter in 2018.

Where we are in our journey

We’ve set clear actions to reduce the gender and ethnicity pay gap. This has helped us identify where action needs to be taken. And while we’ve achieved a lot in a short space of time, we recognise that there’s more to be done.

We are committed to improving our gender balance and have clear plans under our Diversity and Inclusion strategy, focused on actions that we believe as having a positive impact on gender diversity in particular.

We’ve introduced a Diversity Advisory Team, a cross organisational group, who have collective
responsibility to advance progress, challenge the business and drive change. Our Diversity and Inclusion
strategy aims to help us make progress toward achieving gender balance and support our efforts to
reduce the gender and ethnicity pay gap.

Some key initiatives include:

Our Balance Network

Our new Balance network is a visible collective of colleagues who act as a passionate voice, seeking to advance change.

Cross company mentoring

We are supporting, advancing and developing under-represented talent through participating in a cross-company cross-diversity mentoring programme.

Family Policy enhancement

In 2024, we launched a refreshed set of family friendly policies, to ensure colleagues have the right support at key family moments.

Our work in 2025

With female development and retention being a strategic interest, we’ll maintain our efforts to develop a programme which will help advance women below senior manager level. The average length of service of a female senior manager is seven years.

Building on previous years’ work, we’ll continue to draw up diverse-candidate shortlists for roles and encourage candidates to talk with us about flexible working. This opens opportunities to women who otherwise may not be able to work.

Our plans to increase female representation in senior roles this year also extend to:

Continuing to track and report on the success of diverse candidates through our selection process.
Establishing a Family Network, which provides support to those with parental and caring responsibilities.
Introducing back-to-work maternity return mentors, supporting colleagues during their first 12 to 18 months back at work after maternity and adoption.

Expanding our recruitment to include targeting the over 50 market. In addition, a programme has been developed to enable experienced individuals looking to return to work after an extended career break to join us.
Establishing a Family Network, which provides support to those with parental and caring responsibilities
Introducing back-to-work maternity return mentors, supporting colleagues during their first 12 to 18 months back at work after maternity and adoption