MARKETS & TREASURY DIVISIONAL GENDER BALANCE NETWORK, BANK OF IRELAND

”A couple of years ago, I was advertising for a role on my trading team, and was able to look both externally and internally for candidates. Out of the 27 applicants, not a single one was female.”

 

John Reen, Head of Rates Trading, Markets Group, Bank of Ireland.

A couple of years ago, I was advertising for a role on my team, and was able to look both externally and internally for candidates. Out of the 27 applicants, not a single one was female. This motivated me to conduct a few workshops with female Markets & Treasury (M&T) colleagues to help me understand how to attract move diverse applicants for future roles. Around the same time I had attended a lecture on the benefits of team diversity and a course on unconscious bias. What I learned from all this motivated me to join the M&T Gender Balance Network, as I realised that I could and needed to positively impact this vital Group priority.

The M&T GBN has 18 members (7 male…more required!), is chaired by Olivia Case and meets monthly via conference call. It is the first divisional subcommittee and has input from Group colleagues but is mainly comprised of colleagues from across all M&T business units. The committee looks to increase female representation across M&T, but also to implement new ways of working that benefits everyone, male and female. There is a huge amount of work completed and in the pipeline, all centred around generating flexibility,  informing on various roles and opportunities in M&T, promoting female role models, and increasing female applications for roles. A couple of highlights are; the agreement by SLT that all interview panels will be gender neutral as well a commitment to not participate in external panels that are men only; Gender Balance as a standing item on the SLT agenda; working toward gender balanced Job specs; and female mentoring programmes. Within the Markets Group we changed the time of the long-standing traders early morning meeting to improve inclusion. I’m very proud of the progress to date, but there is a lot more to be done to meet the Group and divisional targets, so all ideas and support are very much welcome.

I’m very excited about the Gender Balance ‘Week of Events’ organised by the committee for early December, which will be communicated shortly.  We will have panel discussions on Unconscious Bias, and Gender Balance as well as daily stories from M&T colleagues and a fun quiz to round it off. I would encourage everyone to take some time to tune in if they can.

To learn more about Bank of Ireland’s Gender Balance Networks, join Olivia Case & Michael McLoughlin, co-chairs of the Gender Balance Committee, on Thursday afternoon’s Women In Finance Summit session by clicking here