Today is International Women’s Day. There will be LinkedIn posts celebrating progress. There will be events, panels, and internal communications from Chief Executives affirming their commitment to gender equality. And in most banks, the numbers will be almost exactly where they were this time last year.
That is the uncomfortable truth. The share of women in senior leadership roles in UK financial services rose to 36% in 2024 — one percentage point higher than the previous year. At that rate, according to New Financial, parity will arrive in 2038. Twelve years from now. A generation. If you are a woman entering banking today as a graduate, you will be in your mid-thirties before the industry you joined offers equal representation at the top. If you are already mid-career, the numbers say you will retire before it happens.
This is not a diversity problem. It is a commercial problem, a governance problem, and a people strategy failure. And it belongs squarely on the Chief People Officer’s desk.
The commercial case is not new
The evidence that gender-diverse leadership teams outperform has been accumulating for over a decade. Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 27% more likely to outperform their industry peers on profitability. Companies with the greatest proportion of women on their executive committees earn a 47% higher return on equity than those with none. These are not marginal effects. They are the kind of performance differentials that boards would never ignore if they showed up in a technology investment or a market expansion proposal.
Yet in banking, the numbers barely move. Just 9% of Chief Executive roles in UK financial services are held by women. Only 18.6% of the senior executive population is female. The gender pay gap in the sector is nearly twice the national average, with women in finance earning 78 pence for every pound earned by men. At board level, the gap is even starker — 45% in the banking sector specifically, up eleven percentage points since 2020.
45% The board-level gender pay gap in UK banking — up from 34% in 2020. Despite a decade of charter commitments and diversity programmes, the gap at the top is widening, not narrowing. — EY Global Financial Services Boardroom Monitor, 2026
From what I hear across my network, this is true across private banking, wealth management, and digital banking alike. The pipeline narrows at the same points in every type of institution: the move from middle management to senior leadership, and the move from senior leadership to the executive committee. The question is why, and more importantly, what the Chief People Officer can actually do about it.
Where the pipeline breaks
The pipeline does not break because women leave the industry. It breaks because the systems that determine who gets promoted, who gets sponsored, and who gets the career-defining assignments are not designed to be equitable. They are designed to reward patterns of availability, visibility, and career trajectory that disproportionately disadvantage women — particularly those who have taken time for caring responsibilities, worked flexibly, or built their careers in functions that are not traditionally seen as routes to the top.
Consider sponsorship. Just 31% of entry-level women have a sponsor, compared to 45% of men in similar roles. Sponsorship — not mentorship, but genuine advocacy by a senior leader who puts their reputation behind a more junior colleague — is one of the strongest predictors of career advancement. When the sponsorship gap is this wide at entry level, the leadership gap at senior level is not surprising. It is inevitable.
If you want to know why your senior leadership team is not gender-balanced, do not look at the women who left. Look at the system that decided who stayed.
Consider also the roles that lead to the top. In most banks, the path to the executive committee runs through revenue-generating functions — front office, commercial, technology. Women are disproportionately concentrated in support functions: risk, compliance, human resources, operations. These are essential roles, but they are rarely the roles that produce Chief Executives. A Chief People Officer who is serious about gender balance in leadership needs to address the composition of the pipeline, not just the numbers at the end of it. That means actively sponsoring women into revenue-generating roles, creating lateral moves that broaden commercial experience, and challenging the assumption that leadership readiness looks the same for everyone.
What the Chief People Officer can actually change
Promotion criteria. Most banks promote on the basis of performance and potential — two measures that sound objective but are frequently shaped by bias. Performance is typically measured over the most recent period, which disadvantages anyone who has taken a career break or worked part-time. Potential is often assessed against a model of leadership that was defined by, and for, men. A Chief People Officer who redesigns promotion criteria to assess contribution over a career, not just a year, and who defines potential in terms that do not default to a single leadership archetype, will see the pipeline shift.
Sponsorship, not mentorship. Mentorship programmes are well-intentioned but insufficient. What accelerates careers is sponsorship — a senior leader who actively advocates for a more junior colleague in talent reviews, succession discussions, and assignment decisions. The Chief People Officer can design and mandate sponsorship programmes that pair senior leaders with high-potential women, and hold sponsors accountable for the outcomes. This is not about creating a programme. It is about changing who speaks up for whom in the rooms where decisions are made.
Flexible working as standard, not exception. The single most effective retention tool for women in banking is genuine flexibility — not a policy that exists on paper but is quietly penalised in practice. Research shows that hybrid schedules reduce quit rates by a third. When flexibility is offered without stigma, women stay. When it is offered with a career penalty, they leave — and the pipeline narrows further. The Chief People Officer must ensure that flexibility does not come at the cost of visibility, assignment quality, or promotion eligibility.
2038 The year women are projected to reach parity in senior financial services roles — at the current rate of progress. Twelve years is not a target. It is the cost of incremental thinking. — New Financial, 2024
Pay transparency. The EU Pay Transparency Directive, which takes effect in 2026, will require organisations to disclose pay ranges, report on pay gaps, and give employees the right to request comparative pay information. UK firms with European operations are already preparing. But the principle matters regardless of regulation: when pay is transparent, unexplained gaps become visible, and visible gaps get closed. The Chief People Officer who moves to pay transparency ahead of regulatory pressure sends a signal about the kind of organisation they are building.
Succession planning that challenges assumptions. When a senior role opens, the shortlist is often drawn from a pool that was shaped years earlier by decisions about who got the right assignments, who was sponsored into stretch roles, and who was deemed to have “leadership potential.” If those earlier decisions were biased — and the data says they were — the shortlist will reflect that bias. The Chief People Officer needs to intervene earlier in the process: ensuring that succession pipelines are gender-balanced not at the point of appointment, but at the point of development.
The conversation that matters
International Women’s Day is useful if it prompts action. It is not useful if it prompts only celebration. The conversation that matters is not about what banks have achieved — it is about why, after a decade of commitments, charters, and programmes, the pace of change is still measured in decades rather than years.
The Chief People Officer who brings this conversation to the board — with data, with a plan, and with the credibility to challenge the assumptions that sustain the gap — is the one who will actually change the numbers. Not by 2038. But soon enough to matter for the women who are building their careers in banking right now.
The banks that will lead on this are not the ones with the best International Women’s Day campaigns. They are the ones whose Chief People Officers have redesigned the systems that determine who rises — sponsorship, promotion criteria, succession pipelines, pay structures, and the definition of what leadership looks like. The 2038 timeline is not inevitable. It is the result of doing what we have always done. The Chief People Officer who refuses to accept it is the one who will shorten it.
Domi Alzapiedi is a Chief People Officer in banking, focused on the intersection of people strategy, organisational design, and commercial performance. She writes about the questions that keep leadership teams honest.