HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter – Annual Review 2025

2025 was the biggest year yet for the Charter, with target deadlines looming for half of signatories – of this group only 58% hit their targets. Nonetheless, progress continued as the full cohort of Charter signatories increased female representation to 37% on average, up fro 36% in 2024.

New Financial relies on support from the industry to fund its work. Our reports are available to New Financial member firms, government and regulators, and the media. If you would like to enquire about membership or receiving a copy of the report, please click here

New Financial members, governments and regulators, can also access our complete research archive including this report here What this review is about

The UK government launched the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter in March 2016 to encourage the financial services industry to move towards gender balance in senior management. Ten years later, the Charter has more than 400 signatories covering about 1.1 million employees across the sector.

This ninth annual review continues to monitor the progress of signatories against their Charter commitments to increase female representation in senior management and holds them to account across the four Charter principles. The Charter data provides uniquely rich insight into female representation in financial services, how companies are executing the Charter principles and where they will need to maintain focus. The review is designed to be used by signatories to benchmark their processes and practices, and to provide food for thought and action. This analysis looks at:

• Progress: We look at the signatories with 2025 deadlines and those that have met their targets ahead of their deadlines. We analyse the group that missed their 2025 targets, and why. We also look at whether female representation has increased at signatory firms, and the progress of both sectors and quartiles.

  
  

• Driving change: We discuss what signatories are doing to achieve their targets. The analysis zooms in on the key areas that drive acceleration: taking a data-led approach, being strategic, increasing accountability and innovation. We also look at how signatories capture and apply flexible working data and wider diversity data. We examine the role of the accountable executive, how signatories are linking diversity targets to executive pay, and assess the annual updates that signatories are required to publish on their websites.

  
  

• Context of targets: We look at how ambitious signatories’ targets are, where signatories are today compared to their targets, and how signatories define their senior management populations.

Research methodology:

This review analyses annual updates from 210 signatories that signed the Charter before September 2024, provided an annual update to HM Treasury in September 2025, and have at least 250* staff. Of these 210, twelve are reporting for the first time and 46 are reporting for the ninth time. All data has been anonymised and aggregated, and no data has been attributed without signatories’ consent. The data was analysed by Sheenam Singhal and Jennifer Barrow, under the supervision of Yasmine Chinwala.

About New Financial: 

New Financial is a think tank and forum that makes the positive case for the vital role that capital markets play in driving economic growth. We believe Europe needs bigger and better capital markets to kick start the economy – and that this presents a huge opportunity for the industry and its customers to embrace change and reform, and to rethink how capital markets work.

Acknowledgements:

New Financial would like to thank all our institutional members for their support, and particularly Nationwide, Aviva, London Stock Exchange Group and City of London Corporation for sponsoring our work on the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter.