Aimee: Empowering women in leadership roles

We're committed to having better representation of women throughout our business, particularly in leadership positions. We’ve signed up to the Women in Finance Charter, a government initiative supporting the progression of women into senior roles in financial services.  

We aim to empower and enable women to progress their careers. We have a Women's Network which is a community that celebrates and supports its members, helps everyone to learn more and inspires all of us to aim higher. 

Aimee tells us about her career progression at Royal London, joining our Women’s Network and her experience of being in a senior role.

Finding work life balance

I'm Aimee, Business Manager to our CEO Barry O’Dwyer. I joined the Internal Audit team in 2018 and held several roles across Audit and Risk, including Head of Internal Audit, before moving into the CEO Office in May 2023.  

Before joining Royal London, I qualified as an accountant in 2008 and was promoted ‘through the ranks’ in external audit. My daughter arriving in 2015 changed my priorities and when the opportunity arose at Royal London, work life balance was high on my list of job requirements. Through the recruitment process it was clear that this was also valued by the organisation so I knew I would be supported as a working parent. While flexibility doesn’t only apply to mums, it helps encourages women returning to work and discourages any preconceived ideas that you can’t progress in your career if you need to rush off to do the school run. 

"Through my involvement in the Women’s Network, I’ve mentored junior colleagues to support their career development and aspirations to become leaders of the future"

I joined the Women’s Network when I started at Royal London, a group that aims to empower and inspire women to achieve their full potential. I’ve always been ambitious and, as the financial services industry can be perceived as being male dominated, I was encouraged to see that diversity and inclusion were high priorities. Through my involvement in the Women’s Network, I’ve mentored junior colleagues to support their career development and aspirations to become leaders of the future. It’s important for our commitment to increasing the ratio of females in senior roles and to build a motivated and confident pipeline. Having a mentor or role model to look up to is something that helped me, and I appreciate being able to pay this forward.  

I’m in a privileged position that I attend our monthly Group Executive Committees (GEC) meetings. The GEC is a team of 13 individuals from across our UK, Irish and asset management businesses and, importantly for me, 46% are female. It's important to showcase gender diversity at an executive management level, and our colleague engagement sessions gives access to all colleagues to meet and talk to our executives.

Working to our Inclusion strategy

My role also allows me to see the importance placed by the GEC on our diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy. Each month the GEC look at the gender ratio across our workforce and consider any actions we can take. At a recent meeting, our Head of Inclusion asked GEC members to nominate senior leaders to be part of a working group that champions our D&I agenda. The working group meets regularly and sets action plans for all business areas, which outline the specific actions and deliverables we’re working on to improve our D&I performance. We share ideas, explore challenges, and discuss progress. The ways we’re working on improving our gender balance in senior roles are by ensuring we have diverse candidate pools and leveraging our internal and external networks to attract diverse talent. 

Having a diverse and inclusive workforce is not only the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do. It helps us to understand and serve our customers better, to innovate and grow, and to create a positive and supportive culture where everyone can thrive.  

There isn’t one silver bullet that will allow us to hit our gender diversity targets, but what Royal London is focussed on is being a fair employer, championing career confidence, and being an organisation that women choose to start and progress their career.

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