Published in The European Financial Review
August/September 2022
Shaping the Global Financial Workplace
By Amanda Pullinger, Chief Executive Officer of 100 Women in Finance
During the early days of 100 Women in Finance (100WF), I was a principal at Aquamarine Capital and volunteered with the organisation in a number of capacities before becoming the first executive director and then CEO of 100WF in 2014. The organisation has since grown to 31 locations across five continents. Our united mission globally remains to promote diversity of thought, raise visibility, empower women at each career stage in the finance industry, and inspire the next generation of pre-career women towards pathways into finance.
In 2021, we celebrated our twentieth anniversary and implemented a new guiding purpose – Vision 30/40 – where 30 per cent of senior investment roles and 30 per cent of executive committee roles will be filled by women by 2040. We selected to focus on these roles because they are the most challenging to effect and remain stubbornly under-represented by women.
To further extend the mission, in 2022 100WF created an Industry Award to recognise companies who are working towards Vision 30/40 by establishing specific and innovative processes with purposeful action to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace. The hope is that, through the DEI awards, we can demonstrate that it is possible for firms to create meaningful demographic change if they are deliberate in their commitment to attracting diverse female talent from different backgrounds.
Over the past couple of years, 100WF has been working with Deloitte to create a baseline analysis of women in leadership roles across financial services and to begin looking at actions to take to enable accelerated progress. I would like to highlight some of the findings from this work…