Gender progression at the Bank of England

Why was a change needed?

We both wanted to do something broadly about diversity. I was the chair of the Bank’s Women’s network. Katharine had been at the Bank longer and had a lot of experience of being the only woman in the room. The Bank had had an increased focus on diversity for 10 years and had implemented a number of initiatives. It all looked good, and there was no doubt that over the years the Bank had changed a lot, but were we being complacent?

What bigger goal did you want to achieve?

We wanted much greater diversity across the board, and to understand the issues beyond the numbers. And we wanted a targeted programme to address those issues.

What did you do?

We used the Forward Institute residentials to iterate the questions and improve our focus, breaking the questions down into separate elements. We spent a lot of time walking and talking, and had some great conversations with other Fellows. It was a hard decision but in the end we decided to focus just on gender – we had to make it manageable. We wanted a deep and precise understanding, and that meant narrowing the problem down.

We decided to look at the problem from two angles: the data, and employees’ experiences as expressed through focus groups. We’d been told by the previous cohort there was no way we could do it on our own, so when we got back from the second residential we put a note on the intranet, posing our core question: “We have had all these initiatives, how much progress have we really made? And do you want to be involved?”

25-30 people came to the first meeting, and we got lots of input, lots of practical feedback, and that enabled us to refine our proposal and turn it into more of a workplan. We formed two groups to take on the two strands. The data group brought in statisticians and made the all-important link to HR so that we could access the Bank’s database. The second group worked on the focus groups, again with input from other departments like HR and Legal.

In the end there was a core team of 15-20 people working with us, a real mix of people from across the organisation, junior to senior, men and women. Katharine and I steered the work and provided challenge where needed. The data work was done over the first summer, and then there was a lot of work involved in preparing the focus groups: who should chair, ensuring consistency of questions, who should take notes, etc. The focus groups took place in the autumn. We put a note out on the intranet inviting people to join them. I remember the note went out in mid-August and I was amazed at how many people were interested! In the end we had 150 people. People self-selected, and chose their time slot, so it wasn’t scientific in that sense. But we ensured that every group would use the same questions, the same rules, the same script.

The data showed clearly that we weren’t making as much progress as might have been expected. Across the whole Bank gender progression had plateaued and in some areas it was going backwards.

The next step was to decide how to present the whole thing to senior management. We spoke to HR and the COO, and it was decided that our work would be presented to the Executive in the context of the review of the HR strategy.

Katharine and I were very clear about two things:

1. We wanted the document only to be a statement of the problem: what had emerged from the data, and what the key messages were from the focus groups.

2. We did not want to be part of the solution. We’d be happy to help, but the Executive needed to own it.

It was a hard personal decision to do it this way. We had been very surprised by what we had found, and we were very passionate about it, and wanted so much to do something. But we were really determined that there shouldn’t be a list of initiatives that people could write speeches about and wear as a badge, and not be held accountable for.

So I wrote the paper. It was just two pages, very factual: what we had set out to do, what we did, and what we discovered. No emotional language. There was some pushback on the absence of solutions, but we stuck to our guns and we didn’t change it.

I get quite emotional thinking about it. We were really nervous before the meeting, thinking this was a really bold statement to be making and one that could be perceived as unconstructive. But the comments in the meeting were very powerful – people got really emotional.

The whole thing then went up to the Governors and the Court (our equivalent of the Board) and the paper was widely shared. “These facts are really stark, you can’t argue with facts.” One female executive said she felt as though she had been punched in the stomach.

What has been the outcome?

It has definitely fed into the HR strategy and has affected how we do recruitment, for instance. The data has been improving, so where things were stagnating there has been improvement. There’ve been lots of local initiatives. I have had a number of bilateral meetings with Deputy Governors, who wanted to understand better. It has also had an impact beyond the specific focus, and it is model that has been used to address other diversity questions.

Were there any blocks?

No-one tried to block us but then we didn’t give anyone the opportunity! The COO had given us clear permission to do whatever we wanted to do, so that helped. On top of that, Katharine and I are two people who really know how to get things done! We kept everyone in the loop, while delivering this in a way that we thought was important. We know there are shortcomings in the work, we are not claiming that it is definitive, but this is what we have found out.

What would you have done differently?

If we had had more time we could have improved the focus groups, got a larger sample. But to be honest I’m not sure it would have made a difference.

What did you learn?

Don’t ask permission, and don’t be afraid to say something that is hard for people to hear! Also one of the cultural challenges for us was the perception that there is a right way to think about things. In this context sticking to our guns was really important. This is one of the most rewarding pieces of work I’ve done. I really believed in it. People now refer to the ‘Laura and Katharine’s paper’, and use it as a model for approaching other difficult questions.

This is what Jonathan Curtiss and Lea Paterson, Co-Executive Directors for People and Culture, have to say:

“The research project undertaken by Katharine and Laura as part of the Forward Institute has been integral to re-focusing efforts on gender progression within the Bank. The findings were presented to our most senior committees and, along with a review into intersectionality, helped inform our recent D&I initiatives. Representation at senior levels within the Bank continues to grow, (and) is now at 32% for women in senior leadership. Additionally, the analytical approach taken in the project has inspired similar research by other staff networks within the Bank and a process to access relevant data whilst maintaining confidentiality has been developed. The introduction of the research conference has also allowed us to use the convening powers of central banks across the globe to raise issues around gender equality within the economics sector.”

What were the international conferences about?

This was really Katharine’s idea. She had had it for a while and we discussed it at the Cambridge residential. We wondered if we would get buy-in – would we get the Governor, Mark Carney, to support it? So we decided to test the water. We were both doing a lot of international travel at the time so we undertook that wherever we went, whatever the meeting or the context, we would talk about gender. Of course we discovered that lots of other people were thinking in similar terms, and that there was support for organising something. We approached the Governor’s office for permission, and then we took on the organising ourselves, with a small team of helpers, and lots of help from HR and from the Press and Comms team. We didn’t want it to be an HR conference though. We wanted it to target economists and academics as we thought they really needed to understand the issues.

When we put out a call for papers we had no idea what the response would be, and were astonished when 70 papers were submitted. We spent ages going through them. We were amazed to find out how many people were doing work on the issue!

So far we’ve had two conferences. The first was hosted by us at the Bank of England in 2017. People came from all over the world – Central Banks from many different countries, plus the IMF, the World Bank and so on – and lots of academics and prominent women from the financial sector.

The second conference was hosted by the ECB in Frankfurt in 2019. On the second day there was a closed session with just the three main central banks, the IMF and the World Bank, so that we could discuss what we’d learned. I remember one woman from the Fed was very emotional about the fact that our first conference had prompted her to speak much more honestly about how she was being treated and how her boss would never defend her in public. The third conference will be hosted by the Fed but has been postponed by the Covid crisis. The idea is to align it with a G20 meeting so all the principals will be there.

It really has taken on a life of its own. Katharine and I are now sponsors rather than organisers. People really do want to attend, which is good sign of success. We were of course helped by #MeToo. We discovered that there were lots of pockets of unrest and lots of people who’d been working on the issue and we were able to connect them together. The appetite certainly exceeded what we were able to deliver and there’s a big desire to keep going on a regular basis.

It will come back to the Bank of England after the next one and we think we should now start talking about action and how we measure it – what’s working, what’s changing. Maybe draw up some targets and then come back in a few years to review progress.