Cicero Group provides commitments to Women in Finance initiative
In October 2016, Cicero Group was proud to be the first corporate communications agency to sign HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter. As part of our commitments to this charter, each year in September, we will update HMT on our progress towards reaching and/or maintaining our targets.
By signing up to this charter, we have made a commitment to drive change and promote gender diversity at all levels in the agency. At Cicero we believe gender balance is vital for success in an industry where people and diversity of thought are our best assets.
Harnessing the talents of women in communications, financial services and beyond is one of our strategic diversity priorities and we are delighted to make this commitment. As the first communications agency to sign the charter back in 2016, Cicero believes it has a role to play in driving equality across the financial services industry.
Cicero offers unique career opportunities to those with an interest in both public affairs and communications. A number of our clients have a financial services focus and therefore when hiring and developing the very best talent to deliver excellence to our clients, Cicero often places a high emphasis on knowledge and experience of the industry.
As part of this commitment we have set ourselves a number of gender diversity targets and will produce an annual public report on our progress towards our numerical target each year. You will find this update for each year below.
Target: 50% of all total new hires and interns going forward should be women (with a 10% confidence interval).
2021 Update: Since joining the charter in 2016 we are proud to confirm that we have continued to ensure that 50% of our new hires and interns have been female. This has been achieved by re-wording our job adverts, reviewing these for unconscious bias wording, including women in all interview panels during the recruitment process, reaching out to a wider talent pool to shortlist a better gender balance and unconscious bias training with a focus on recruitment for hiring managers.
In addition to our numerical target, we continue to set ourselves non-numerical targets to enhance gender diversity and equal opportunities at Cicero. As well as a focus on fair recruitment and talent pools we have recently reviewed our family friendly, maternity, paternity, shared parental leave and flexible working policies. We have also increased opportunities to training and mentoring programmes for all staff.
We are delighted to have appointed Judith Becker, Executive Director as responsible for driving these targets and ensuring they stay at the top of the board level agenda. Speaking in March 2018, Judith said:
“Reviewing our Women in Finance Charter targets provides a real opportunity to take stock of the excellent progress Cicero has made over the past year towards promoting better gender equality. By focusing on a series of formal and informal initiatives, undertaking regular employee training and having a company culture firmly committed to the advantages that a diverse and motivated workforce brings, we have progressed against every target we have set ourselves.
“More progress needs to be achieved across the business community, however I am proud of the steps that Cicero continues to take to create a more diverse and inclusive environment for our employees.”
