HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter

When we signed up to the Charter in 2021, we had 40% female representation in the business and 37% female representation in our senior manager population.

As of September 2024, we have 48% female representation in the organisation and 27% female representation in senior management roles. We are pleased to see an increase in female representation across Octopus since 2021 and recognise there is work still to do to improve representation within our senior management population. The decrease is largely related to temporary changes in management structures around the business and is why we extended our timeframe to achieving our goal to 2030 last year. We will soon be welcoming a new female Head of Octopus Ventures, which will see our female representation at Exco & Board level improve further and are actively using balanced short listing and targeted recruitment with agencies to improve our pipeline of candidates.

With this in mind, we believe we are on track to meet our Charter target of 50% of senior management by a deadline of 2030.

Policy & Process: We have dedicated time to reviewing our policies and processes to ensure they are inclusive and support our employees in the right way. Changes to our Reproductive Health, Pregnancy Loss, Carers Leave, Flexible Working policies, and the socialisation of these amongst managers will help to drive forward an inclusive and supportive work environment for women at Octopus.

Employee Voice: We have excitingly launched a Parents and Carers Network and a Women’s Network – aimed at understanding the experiences of, and supporting, our employees. We want there to be a space for employee voice so that we can shape DEI initiatives and targets where there is genuine need and ensure there is accountability to these networks to create meaningful progress and change.

Recruitment: We continue to require balanced shortlists for all senior roles and work with agencies to help us build out a pool of female talent.

L&D: we continue to offer talent development and support to our female leaders and managers across the business.

Succession: we continue to actively monitor succession plans across the business and support our talent in taking opportunities.

When we signed up to the Charter in 2021, we had 40% female representation in the business and 37% female representation in our senior manager population.

As of September 2023 we have 48% female representation in the organisation and 38% female representation in senior management.

Following structural and leadership changes to our organisation this year, we believe we are on track to meet our Charter target of 50% of senior management by a deadline of 2030. This new deadline is in keeping with our other D&I goal for ethnic diversity within our management population.

We continue to run all job descriptions through a gender decoder before advertisement, our recruiting managers have undertaken unconscious bias training and 99% of our interview panels are diverse, all of which has reduced the potential for bias to impact our recruitment process. We also source diverse shortlists for more senior roles across the business.

From a career development perspective, our succession planning activity ensures all of our people are considered for their potential to progress into senior roles, and women and people of colour who have been identified as successors for critical and senior roles have been offered coaching to support their career development. We’ve seen successes in this area and will be expanding that work next year to help progress representation of women in senior roles for those not just in succession plans.

We also continue to publicise our enhanced Shared Parental Leave offering, which supports women and families in balancing career and family and saw an increase in the number of men taking shared parental leave this year (from 1 last year to 8 this year).

When we signed up to the Charter in 2021, we had 40% female representation. As of September 2022 we have 45% female representation. We believe we are on track to meet our Charter target of 50% of senior management by our deadline of 2025, as 41% of our senior managers are currently female.

Throughout the year we have focused on recruitment and progression to support our progress in representation of women in senior roles.

All of our job descriptions now go through a gender decoder before advertisement, our recruiting managers have undertaken unconscious bias training and 99% of our interview panels are diverse, all of which has reduced the potential for bias to impact our recruitment process.

From a career development perspective, our succession planning activity ensures all of our people are considered for their potential to progress into senior roles, and women and people of colour who have been identified as successors for critical and senior roles have been offered coaching to support their career development. We also continue to publicise our enhanced Shared Parental Leave offering, which supports women and families in balancing career and family.

• As of September 2021 our current gender split in senior roles is 63% male and 37% female. We are committed to a 50/50 gender split in our senior roles by May 2025.
• That we would appoint one member of our senior executive team to be responsible and accountable for gender diversity and inclusion.
• We will publish progress against our targets each year on our website.
• That we intended to link the pay of the senior executive team to delivery against our internal targets on gender diversity.

We hope to make great progress against our commitments and are confident that our focus on the following initiatives will support us in achieving them:

• We have partnered with Work180 to help us source senior female candidates for vacancies within our business.
• We have reviewed our approach to inclusive recruitment and incorporated gender decoding software, gender balanced shortlists and interview panels.
• We are introducing hiring manager training on recruitment and unconscious bias.
• We have recently enhanced our Shared Parental Leave policy to enable either parent (regardless of gender) to take up to 6 months off work (fully paid) during the first 12 months of the birth or adoption of their child. We believe that it’s important that all parents, regardless of gender, can take time off to spend with their new-born.
• We also believe that our flexible working policies enable parents to return to the workplace at a pace that suits them in line with business requirements.
• We continue to work hard to ensure our working practices aren’t a barrier to hiring and are flexible in our approach to working from home when needed.
• We track diversity and use it to inform our efforts across all diversity and inclusion activity.