Taking our women further 

We are committed to developing our people and creating a culture where everyone, regardless of gender or background, has the opportunity to succeed.

In 2017 we launched our Women's Empowerment Programme which aims to create a flexible and supportive environment, ultimately enabling more women to reach leadership positions.

It is widely recognised that a more diverse leadership team is good for business. We want to better represent our people and our clients, believing that smart decisions today will create lasting value for our Crowe team and their clients tomorrow.

Current landscape

Workplace studies show that where at least 30% of leadership teams are female, the impact on the business is greater. Currently Crowe’s female partners represent 25% of the leadership team and in addition, make up one third of the Executive Board.

In March 2019 when we signed up to the Women in Finance Charter as a commitment to improve gender diversity among or people, we had 24% female representation at partner level. At Crowe we are actively working to have a balance of 30% women at partnership level by 31st March 2024. We believe that we are on track to achieve our Charter target by this deadline.

Our objectives

We aim to create an environment which is collaborative, supportive and promotes talent from across the whole firm.

To do this we set out key objectives in our Women's Empowerment Programme business plan. While none of these initiatives are gender exclusive, they have be designed to tackle the main barriers facing women in finance.

• Engagement – engagement and support from the senior leadership team and Executive Committee has been crucial and from this we have created a team of champions from the existing partner group who are leading change across the firm. This is part of our one firm mind-set and allows for consistency across our initiatives. They are a mixture of men and women, but fundamentally are excellent role models for women. Having good role models is important for progression and sharing these champions’ personal stories has been invaluable.

• Agile working – lack of flexibility makes it harder to balance our personal lives and work. At a time when mental health is firmly on the agenda, creating options for our people to have the right space and time to work can help remove some of these issues, resulting in a more productive, efficient working environment, we aim to remove the restrictions that focus on ‘desk time’ and create an agile working policy that means our people have a more choice around how, where and when they work, contributing to a more rewarding experience.
  
  
• Mentoring – having a good mentor can help accelerate the development of key talent. It can sometimes be difficult for women to find a mentor that they can relate to, which means that they can miss out on this support, and as a consequence, do not progress through to leadership as quickly as their male colleagues.

We aspire to develop strong diverse leaders and have invested in a mentor training programme to support this. Potential mentees are invited to apply to participate in the programme, giving them access to the experience and expertise that the mentors have to offer. The mentor training has been extended and is open to all employees, giving all our people access to a mentor should they need it and the same time increase their prospects for advancing to leadership positions.

Since we signed up to the Charter, we have made good progress against our key objectives. All areas have been implemented and have been embedded into the organisation.

Objectives for the coming year

• Respect – addressing internal behaviour, inclusive language, unconscious bias including ‘uncomfortable conversations’ training. This aligns with our wider Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda.
• Identifying the female talent pipeline, supported by leadership training programmes.
• Return to work programme – for our people who have had a career break (maternity, sickness or sabbatical).

In this episode Rebecca is joined by Lucy Noone-Blake who has spent her career working in the hospitality and food industry, and has recently set up her own marketing and experience consultancy. Rebecca and Lucy discuss the challenges Lucy faced in setting up her own business – including having spent over 50% of its existence in lockdown – the stigma faced by female entrepreneurs, and what business advice she has been giving her clients throughout the global pandemic.