Women in Finance

Our 2023 Report

At Marsh and Guy Carpenter, we aim to create an inclusive environment where all colleagues can thrive and reach their full potential, whatever their identity or background. All colleagues should feel able to be their self, be heard and supported, and have a true sense of belonging at our Company. We believe this to be a fundamental driver to our success as a business. Every colleague has unique knowledge and experience. Individually this makes us valuable – and together extraordinary.

As part of our commitment to driving inclusion and diversity within our Company, we are dedicated to accelerating the advancement of women, both inside our firm and across our industry. 

We recognise that we do not have as many women in positions of leadership as we would like, and we are keen to drive a meaningful change so that we can better reflect the communities that we serve and continue to be competitive as we look towards the future. 

We believe having women in leadership is good for business. The value of women in senior roles is clear and we believe that the culture of our organisation will benefit as we improve representation, as will our performance and profitability. 

Our commitment

When we signed up to the Women in Finance Charter in 2018, we aspired to 25% women in leadership roles by 2023. We exceeded this target this year as we now have 28% women in leadership positions. We are pleased with our progress and we remain steadfastly committed to growing this representation. 

This year we are setting ourselves a new five-year target of reaching 35% female representation in leadership positions by 2028. We believe this is a realistic target that will help us in our progress towards gender parity.  

Alongside our leadership representation target, our other commitments as part of the Charter remain in place:  

• To achieve a year-on-year 50/50 gender split in our early careers population, including our graduate and apprentice programmes.  
• To ensure recruitment searches for senior roles (Senior Vice President Grade and above) incorporate gender diverse candidate populations.
• To link the achievement of diversity and inclusion targets to the overall business strategy and personal goals of our Executive Committee. These targets are to be assessed and measured as part of the year end performance and compensation review.

2023 progress highlights

In aiming to improve the representation of women at our senior grades, we are continuing with several initiatives while introducing new approaches and pivoting in our action plan when needed. Some of our key progress highlights from the past year include:  

• A 53% female graduate intake as part of our early careers programme. 
• A continued improvement in our female pipeline into senior roles. 38% of promotions into Managing Director and 41% of our promotions into Senior Vice President were for women.  
• A highly visible campaign with colleagues on the topic of menopause. This included highly popular live awareness events, toolkits for colleagues and managers, the creation of a menopause support network, and training for people managers. 
• Continued improvements to our policies, processes, and benefits in support of a gender inclusive culture that will ensure that our female colleagues have the best chance of thriving at work. Developments this year include a toolkit and training for HR on dealing with domestic abuse in the workplace, women’s health sessions as part of our wellbeing roadshows, and the roll out of free menstrual products in the majority of our UK offices. 
• Delivery of the fourth year of our Aspire Programme. We doubled the numbers this year to bring the 2023 cohort to 60 and we have been shortlisted for a 2023 Women in Insurance Contribution to Gender Inclusion Award for this Programme. 
• A number of successful and highly visible initiatives, spearheaded by our gender focused Colleague Resource Groups. Highlights this year have included the Bigger; Bolder; Braver client event focusing on the need for significant commitments to drive the gender equity agenda forward and the internal Balance Awards, for top female role models and male allies, which garnered over 1000 colleague votes. 
• The formation of a new Parents and Carers Colleague Resource Group, with the aim of serving as a voice for this group that were disproportionality affected during the pandemic to provide feedback to the organisation on challenges and opportunities for these colleagues and to help drive change. 
• A focus on intersectionality through events such as Exploring the Intersection Between Womanhood and Race as part of Black History Month and Women and Non-Binary People in the Workplace with myGwork as part of our Pride line up. 

Accountability in leadership

Chris Lay, CEO of Marsh UK and Marsh McLennan UK, and Paul Moody, CEO of Guy Carpenter UK, are our senior executive team members responsible and accountable for gender diversity and inclusion within our organisation. The full executive teams of both Marsh and Guy Carpenter have made specific commitments to advance our work across all areas of our diverse communities. 

More broadly, Marsh and Guy Carpenter consider leadership to be a mindset, not a title. One of the qualities that is considered to make a great leader here is the ability to unlock people’s full potential and this includes building a diverse workforce where all colleagues can grow and thrive. We expect leaders at all levels to support the development of our inclusive culture and the advancement of our diversity commitments in their work.