Gender Diversity

Being able to attract, develop and retain talent is key to the success of our business

We are proud signatory to HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter, through which we have formally committed to addressing the gender imbalance in financial services. As one of the first signatories we made a commitment of 35% female representation across our management roles by 2021 which is something we are thrilled to have achieved. 

We already have a number of activities in place to support our ongoing commitment to gender equality, including; unconscious bias awareness, our new employer brand campaign, our family-friendly policies and the launch of a dedicated women’s forum.

Our commitment to gender diversity is led from the top, with our Chief Executive Officer, Georges de Macedo, championing this important initiative.

Click on the reports below to find out more:

Our gender diversity initiatives:

  • While we are delighted by the narrowing of our pay gap, we continue to remain committed to improving further.
  • We run a sponsorship programme that links high-potential mid-level and senior female colleagues with senior leaders to provide them with career support, mentoring and guidance coupled with an additional program called Inspire XL which was designed to give all our leaders an opportunity to understand personality profiling and how to better interact with one another to grow confidence.
  • Our Females of the Future saw the launch of a level 5 Women in leadership apprenticeship programme with Raise The Bar in March 2022. 17 females have signed up to this programme and we are planning to launch cohort 2 later this year. We are also looking to launch a level 3 programme shortly, to support those who are in the early stage of their leadership journey. We truly believe that this will support our ambitions to grow our own talent and increase the number of internal managerial promotions, 70% of our leadership roles have been filled by internal candidates in 2022.
  • This year, we supported the 10,000 Black Interns initiative, where we offered a six week work experience programme for a number of highly talented students, who were able to gain valuable insight into areas such as Actuarial, HR, Commercial and Personal Lines. This has helped us to build up our talent pipelines for our graduate programmes of the future. We have already pledged 25 places for the 2023 programme.
  • We have a number of programmes specifically targeted at building our talent pipeline of female colleagues at all levels and have embedded procedures at all stages of the employee lifecycle to ensure we can help attract, retain, develop and support women.
  • We embrace flexible and agile working for both men and women, with currently 5% of males and 31% of females working part time.
  • Our training programme continues to evolve for recruiting managers to be aware of unconscious bias and ensure they follow a fully inclusive recruitment process, and all our interview guidance and materials reinforce this.
  • We support talented women across our organisation by providing career development opportunities, return to work support, and flexible working options, including career breaks.
  • Our family phased programme offers support to our people when they take family leave. We have an online support pack to help them prepare for their temporary departure and we have scheduled in virtual support groups so people can meet others in similar/same situation as them. We support them about how to get the most out of KIT days and where they can go to plan their return when their leave comes to an end. We offer further support for those returning from leave to help them re-connect with their team/role and ensure they have a smooth transition back to work.
  • We run all our recruitment ads through a job description decoder which removes gender biased language and analyses job description against other critical success factors.
  • We have committed to the ABI Making Work Flexible charter to promote and support opportunities for all our people to access flexible working options.
  • We continue to support the women in finance charter and have met and exceeded our target of 36.7% for 2022, setting ambitious targets for the future.
  • We have become a disability confident committed employer and want to drive intersectionality as a key element of our inclusion journey, ensuring that we remove barriers to development and engage every learning style.
  • Covéa’s identity disclosure rates have increased from 29% in 2019 to 71% in Sept 22 which is an increase of 41% . This increase is significant and reflects the great work being done to create a safe and trusted environment so people can share without judgement.
  • Feedback from our people shape our policies and processes and this year we launched our menopause policy supported with menopause cafes, our domestic abuse policy, a transitioning policy to provide additional time and understanding for individuals going through this process and bolstered our employee assistance programme.