Gender pay gap: our action plan

We continue to improve our recruitment practices and processes, including reviewing job descriptions and adverts to make sure they are inclusive. 

This includes:

• Using an inclusive language tool to make sure we are not using gendered and non-inclusive language.
• Reviewing role requirements to distinguish essential from desirable skills.
• Publishing salary bands in our job adverts to support women by closing the gender pay gap, ensuring fair starting pay, and stopping past low wages from following them into new roles.
• Sharing information on our values and culture, reasonable adjustments and flexible working options.
• Developing a standard role specification for professional support roles.

We seek applications from a wide range of candidates through targeted outreach to attract diverse candidates, including females, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and neurodiversity, and lower socio-economic status applicants. This includes:  

• Working with our diversity networks, including our gender equality and minority ethnic women networks to engage with diverse talent.
• Participation in external events such as Women in Data to showcase female role models.
• Making sure all professional support roles are advertised externally and require all shortlists for professional support roles to have at least one male candidate.
• Running targeted early careers programmes, including the Black Futures Programme and Females of the Future Programme, to build a long-term pipeline of diverse female talent.
• Hosting insight days with partnerships including WCAN, upReach and MyPlus to demystify the FCA and give students a real insight into our strategy, our culture and the impact they can have here.

We monitor recruitment outcomes quarterly to support fair and consistent processes. 

We also monitor the recruitment funnel, which helps us to track application to hiring outcomes by gender and ethnicity. This enables us to identify potential bias at each stage and intervene where disparities appear.

We use a range of inclusive practices to make sure our interviews are fair. 

This includes:

• Providing all hiring managers with inclusive hiring training.
• Using inclusive hiring panels consisting of at least 2 people and diversity of thought representation to make decision-making fairer.
• Sharing interview questions in advance to help reduce candidate anxiety, creating a more inclusive interview particularly for neurodivergent individuals. 
• Asking all candidates the same role-relevant questions to assess the skills and knowledge needed for the job. 
• Using an interview review template to grade responses and interview performance. 

Flexible working, hybrid working and leave policies form part of our wider employment offer. We actively promote these policies to support inclusion and retention. 

We review these policies regularly.

We use organisational data to identify progression barriers by gender and ethnicity.  

We regularly review promotion data, and design targeted interventions to support progression into management and senior leadership roles, particularly for women and ethnic minorities.

We offer a range of support to help employees develop and reach their full potential.  

This includes:

• Career progression panels targeted by grade to provide insights.
• Showcasing senior minority ethnic women as role models through panel talks.
• Career development programme for associate grade colleagues.
• Talent accelerator programmes for future managers and senior leadership.

People managers play a key role in supporting and developing our colleagues and teams. We support them by providing training on:

• How to give effective and actionable feedback.
• How to deal with difficult and sensitive conversations, personal resilience.

We also provide prompts and guidance for people managers and colleagues on having development and talent conversations throughout the year. 

Additionally, we use data to identify barriers to progression for different demographic groups. We then tailor interventions in response. 

We offer formal and informal mentoring, sponsorship and development interventions, including:

• Peer-led group mentoring led by our gender equality network.
• Intergenerational mentoring programme led by our age network.
• Alumni support for those who take part in our talent accelerator programme.
• Mentoring, coaching and leadership development via our FCA Academy learning and development portal. 

We have continued to make progress towards our gender and ethnicity targets, in particular to improve representation within our senior leadership team (SLT). Our SLT includes heads of departments, directors, executive directors, the chief executive and the chair.  

As a signatory of the Women in Finance Charter, we reached gender parity (50%) at SLT level ahead of a deadline of March 2025. We now monitor this on an ongoing basis.  

In April 2025, we reviewed our progress against previous diversity representation targets and set new goals.

Find out more about our goals.

We take a transparent approach to pay and performance, so all colleagues understand our pay structure and how decisions are made.

We publish our annual pay gap report on our website. This includes publishing our ethnicity pay gaps and disability pay gaps, despite there being no legal requirement to report these, as we believe that data transparency drives positive action. We also publish intersectional data to assess the pay gaps between minority ethnic women and white men.

Since 2022, we have focused the largest pay increases on those in less senior roles. This has resulted in a positive impact on the pay of younger, female and minority ethnic colleagues, helping to underpin the improvements in our pay gaps.

Our annual pay review makes sure that colleagues with the strongest performance, positioned lowest in the pay range, receive the biggest percentage base pay increase. This makes sure their salaries progress at a faster rate, tackling longstanding concerns about fair pay progression.

We publish a comprehensive Equality Impact Assessment of the outcome of the annual pay review to provide further transparency on our pay and performance outcomes.  

We also increase transparency by:  

• Including pay ranges in job descriptions and adverts.
• Sharing a pay calculator tool as part of our annual pay review so that colleagues can get an idea of what different performance ratings may mean to their pay review award.
• Sharing all job opportunities with colleagues on internal jobs board.
• Regular reporting monitors promotion, recruitment and attrition outcomes by gender and ethnicity.

This has helped reduce our pay gaps. In 2025, and for the first time, all our median gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps were in single figures. This has remained the case in 2026.

Flexible working, hybrid working and leave policies form part of our wider employment offer and are actively promoted to support inclusion and retention.  

Our policies are in the FCA employee handbook, which is available both:

• internally for colleagues  
• externally to prospective applicants and candidates

Our diversity networks often share information with their communities through events and newsletters on the different types of leave, policies and benefits we have to support colleagues.  

We provide guidance, support and training for our people managers to help them manage difficult or sensitive conversations.

Hybrid working policy

We recently reviewed our hybrid working policy. An updated policy takes effect from September 2026.  

The evidence-based policy review considered the different impacts of remote and hybrid working on women and other groups. This review involved engaging with through:

• Our Staff Consultative Committee (SCC)
• Our diversity networks, in particular our gender equality, caregiving, disability and social mobility networks.
• Feedback from employee engagement surveys.  

Parental leave

We worked closely with the SCC and our diversity networks when developing our updated paternity and parental leave approach.  

We offer equalised paid leave for all parents, providing up to 20 weeks of fully paid leave where the colleague meets the eligibility requirements for statutory pay across the following leave.  

• Maternity
• Partner (paternity)
• Adoption
• Surrogacy
• Shared parental

We also offer paid time off to attend certain relevant appointments, neonatal care leave and parental bereavement paternity leave where eligible.  

Our inclusive policy reflects all relevant legislative requirements and, in many areas, exceeds them.  

Time off for personal circumstances

We understand all colleagues have responsibilities outside of work and that unexpected events can happen to all of us.  

We are proud to support our colleagues through our ‘time off for personal circumstances’ leave which allows colleagues to strike a positive work-life balance throughout their employment with us.  

This gives colleagues up to 10 days’ paid leave (pro rata) for:  

• Carer leave
• Challenging personal events
• Compassionate leave
• Dependent emergencies
• Domestic abuse
• Domestic emergencies
• Miscarriage and baby loss
• Parental bereavement