DAME INGA BEALE ON 25 FEMALE FTSE 100 CEO’S BY 2025

Dame Inga Beale

We caught up with Dame Inga Beale, former CEO fo Lloyds of London, on her new initiative 25x25, which aims to get 25 Female CEOs on the FTSE 100 by 2025.

You’re spearheading a new initiative, 25x25. Can you tell us how it came into being?

A few senior financial services women pulled together a group called the Women's Networking Group with the idea that we would have dinner and discuss topical issues. In October 2019 we had a dinner, and talked about the lack of female CEOs in the listed environment. And a few of us got excited, namely Tara Cemlyn-Jones. She followed up with me and some others about it, 'well, why don't we create an initiative to try and increase the number of female CEOs in the FTSE 100?' After several conversations, we decided to aim for 25 percent so 25 female CEOs by 2025, because that gives gives us a time bound target [there are currently 9 female CEOs on the FTSE 100]. We wanted to have something that at least would get people talking because if it was too wishy washy, you wouldn't necessarily get people buying in and thinking it was interesting enough.

How are you going about reaching the target? What’s the plan to make it happen?

We're asking corporations to collaborate and we are going to be delivering lots of data and analytics tools around the progress of how women go up through the ranks. We'll be asking them to have proper shortlists and long lists of potential candidates. We've got search firms signing up and we'll ask them to abide by a code, which will provide benchmarks, for example 50-50 gender balance for senior roles.

So there are various things that we're going to be asking the members to do. Maybe some of it will be specific female development programmes, whatever's necessary for them. But particularly to look for when you're recruiting and promoting into positions that you have a balance between the genders in the candidate list.

Do you expect the female FTSE 100 CEOs to be represented in particular sectors more than others?

We don't think there will be one particular sector that will win over another. And if you look already at what there is in the FTSE 100, you've got the females that are there are in different sectors already, so it doesn't seem to be a particular pattern.

What's much more important is the culture within the organisation, the determination of the board to do something about it and of the executive committee in terms of how they plan and manage their talent. So it's much more about the culture within a firm rather than the sector.

As a society we’ve obviously made huge leaps when it comes to women taking leadership positions in society. What do you think will accelerate it further? You mentioned the importance of culture?

So we've talked a lot about unconscious bias and conscious bias, and there's something more - why do people respond differently to different genders? There was some research done linked to Julia Gillard's leadership, the former Australian prime minister. They did a lot of work on microaggressions and we've got to try to knock that, which is really getting into the culture because we've got policies and practices trying to address it which means that it should be much more equal.

We were trying to uncover the biases that are within firms and people and society. We've now got to delve more into these microaggressions, how people respond to different people because there's something much deeper in what puts a woman off staying in the organisation and what keeps her there. The stats around microaggressions are clear that there are more microaggressions against women than men at all levels in an organisation.

What is a microaggression? How do you tackle it?

It is the way you've responded or said something, it could be a sarcastic remark, undermining someone. It could even be laughing. It could be anything that's actually rather negative towards somebody. And sometimes these can be hurtful. Sometimes the person who's done it doesn't even know they've done it. And this is why it's so difficult to unpick.

I think the only thing is to start to explore recording it because what I've found in all of this stuff is that often we don't talk about these things because it is a bit tricky. It's not a pure science. There are humans involved. It's very difficult to collect data. But I think there is a way that we have to get smarter at recording some of these behaviours. You gather the data and then you have a conversation about why - why did this happen against this person versus that person?

Interestingly, the first female broker at Lloyd’s, Liliana Archibald, was allowed into the market in 1973. We’ve come on quite a bit since then, however, it’s not that long ago and finance in general is male dominated. How do you get more diverse people, including women, into the space?

Well, this is the question that everyone's trying to answer. And no one really has that answer yet, and there’s multiple angles. First of all, you've got to have a real belief in the organisation from the top that they want to do something about it. It's no good just jumping on a bandwagon and saying Yes, yes, we want to do this if fundamentally senior leadership doesn’t really want it. In those cases, it's really not going to not going to work.

You've got to communicate constantly about it so that people really get it throughout the organisation. I believe you've got to change all your policies and practices to make sure there is nothing unequal in there. So from simple things that we can understand - parental leave, job descriptions. Is there some wording in there that's putting off a certain group of people that when you're the person writing it, you're not aware that it's putting them off because this is the subtlety around putting some people off. And I know from experience how tough this from introducing apprenticeships into Lloyd's. We were the first accredited apprenticeship programme in insurance, and we went specifically to one borough in London Tower Hamlets, wanting the group of apprentices to come out of there, who matched the demographics of the borough, and we never got it. We still tended to get people who looked like the people who were already employed, so to break out of it is really, really tough.

You've got to try and understand what's the barrier? Why are you not attractive to these people? And it can be things as subtle as the wording of a job opening, or is there something in that it's putting someone off for even applying? I think you've also got to have targets and have remuneration variables based on achievement of targets. It should be measured like any other business metric that people take seriously.

During your tenure as CEO of Lloyds of London, you championed bringing more diversity and culture change. How did you go about it given a 300-year-old legacy culture?

Well, first thing, of course, is you can't alienate the existing people. So you've got to introduce the topic showing that you're serious about it, but then also let a grassroots movement start. One of the key things that happened was I stood up and spoke about what I saw as an issue. I wanted to make sure that we were reflecting our customers around the world, reflecting customers of the future. So we understood what products and things we need to do, to develop and that we were being more creative and innovative, and that really only comes when you've got a diverse team together with people coming at things from different angles.

So I started talking at a high level about the business need for it and that enabled or empowered people in the organisation to take it seriously, because it was coming from the top. Then people would come and say, can we have an employee resource group to talk about cultural differences and awareness and then disabilities and women, LGBT and things like that? And they did. And then they came and said, Well, actually, we'd like to hold an event. Could we have an event focussed on this so that all started very organically until we got to a sort of crescendo where we realised we needed to do something major for the market. We launched a big diversity and inclusion festival in 2015, not really knowing how it would go down, and it unleashed conversations and a passion in a lot of people. There were lots of wrongs that need to be righted and we want the market to be modern and last for centuries to come. And then of course, we did all of the policies and practices and targets and signed up to charters and joined associations and wanted to improve on the index and did surveys.

There has been a backlash of sorts against social justice movements, with anxiety in the media about the ‘woke brigade’ in certain publications, even though statistics demonstrate there is much work yet to do across industries. How do you counter those narratives whilst still pushing equity and inclusion forward?

Well, people are learning all the time on this and I'm talking about the people who've been working on this topic for decades. I mean, I was a business CEO and happened to know that this was going to be an important aspect of running a business. Otherwise we weren't going to be able modernise. People who are experts have to constantly change, improve and upgrade as you do with anything. So what you were talking about three years ago, just like the phone you had four years ago is no longer adequate. It's the same with this. What we were doing on this and talking about three years ago is probably no longer adequate. We've got to keep moving with the times, upgrade ourselves, upgrade our knowledge, make sure people don't get fatigued because it's like anything. People just get fatigued, they roll their eyes and think not this again. Human stories are important to prevent that. You've got to somehow appeal to emotion around the topic, and that is a very difficult thing to do when people are bored and fed up with it. But you can convert a lot of people when they've got a member of their family who's suddenly not had an opportunity. They've seen it firsthand and then suddenly they're evangelical about the need for change.

What makes you hopeful about today vs. when you started your career, when it comes to where the world is heading?

I think about the time when I walked out of my job because of a sexist incident and I just felt I didn't belong. I wasn't valued. I wasn't respected. I needed to get out of there as quickly as possible. I just don't think that happens now. Firms won't allow you to just to walk out. They'll want to uncover why. I feel that with all the groups and bodies and charities, if you really are in trouble over something, there's someone you can talk to. Whereas in my day it felt as though there was nobody to talk to. Nowhere to go. And it's such a different world now.

Social media has also helped. It has connected people on topics who would never have otherwise been connected. I know in terms of mental health issues, we've got people, business people who would never, ever would have wanted to talk publicly about having depression or trying to commit suicide. And then we found people who were able to record videos of their story and share it with everyone. That has changed things dramatically. This willingness to share the story and hopefully get other people to understand where you're coming from, particularly as we are all different. That’s been really powerful.