Women in Finance Charter

The Charter is a financial services commitment to achieve greater gender balance and inclusivity across the financial services sector in Ireland. Signatories of the Charter commit their organisations to improving the number of women in management and board level positions to achieve better gender balance and a more inclusive working environment. Further information is available on the Better Balance website.

Our commitment to the Women in Finance Charter is underpinned by our targets.

We set targets to focus on our commitment to support women to take up more of our senior management roles.

We believe supporting women to develop throughout their careers is key and we continue to work towards enabling women to make up a minimum 28% of our combined senior management group. We continue to challenge ourselves to achieve and increase on this target.

Diversity and inclusion are important to us at Ecclesiastical. We recognise that everyone is different, and value our people for the individual contribution they make. We know that diversity in our business enhances our business performance and we encourage our people to use their experience, ideas and their unique character in their work.

Fairness and equity are already important principles that underpin our working practices, and we support all our employees in reaching their potential.

We do however see that there are some opportunities for us to enhance our approach and here are some examples of the actions in our plans:

• Review our candidate communications to more clearly communicate our commitment to gender diversity.
• Clearly setting out and embedding our commitment to diversity within our target culture model and Code of Conduct, as well as on our careers pages.
• Establish a Diversity and Inclusion Working Group and refresh our plans to continue to raise awareness about diversity and inclusion in our business and develop our inclusive culture.

• Provide the development and stretch challenges, to enable our female talent to reach their potential.
• Support people to grow their careers through our General Insurance and People Leaders Academies.
• Providing leadership development and stretch challenges to enable our female talent to reach their potential through our Benefact Leadership Development Programme.

• Continue to enhance gender monitoring within our performance moderation, and pay bonus and review processes.
• Continue to enhance gender monitoring of remuneration packages at recruitment and promotion.
• Enhancing our support for parents through our parental leave benefits – increasing our maternity and adoption and doubling paternity leave and pay.
• Continuing to enhance gender monitoring within our performance, pay and bonus processes.
• Enhancing how we gather and report data – including in our Annual Report & Accounts.

• Ensure the continued excellence and employee awareness of our suite of flexible working and family-friendly policies.
• Support our employees to build their own resilience enabling them to better manage both workplace and personal challenges.

There is no simple answer to creating a better gender balance in our organisation. So the solution will also require a range of actions taking effect over the medium term.