Why diverse markets need diverse talent  Opening remarks given by Andrew Hauser, Executive Director, Markets  At Next Step FX: Promoting Career Opportunities for Women in FX, London 27 June 2019  I am very grateful to Michelle Kearns for helping prepare these remarks, and to Grigoria Christodoulou, Rohan Churm, Amber Evans, Sumita Ghosh, Amy Lee and Ben Martin for their advice and comments. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  Introduction  Thank you very much for the invitation to open this event today. Promoting greater diversity in capital markets is a subject of great importance to me, to the Bank of England, and – I believe – to the continued prosperity of the financial markets and economy as a whole. Let me say why. The foreign exchange market is the nerve centre of the global financial system – settling some $ trillion of transactions every day, supporting trade, travel and investment. And its heart is here in London, which has nearly 40% of the global market. That’s a big responsibility, and one we at the Bank of England take very seriously. We are active ourselves in the market every day, buying and selling currencies on behalf of the UK Government and other central banks, and managing the UK’s foreign exchange reserves. I and my staff speak regularly to a wide range of market participants to gather insights on developments for the Bank’s monetary and financial policy committees. I chair the London Foreign Exchange Joint Standing Committee.

Lucy Kellaway, writing in the FT, described the toxic male environment she experienced on an FX trading floor early in her career. 4 Though many men were (and are) equally  1  https://www.globalfxc.org/membership.htm https://www.globalfxc.org/global_index.htm https://www.ft.com/content/62001b10-90de-11e8-9609-3d3b945e78cf 4 https://www.ft.com/content/511ad09e-6be2-11e4-b939-00144feabdc0 2 3  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  2  disgusted by such behaviour, it is unlikely to have been helped by the gender balance in the market. The 2016 Gadhia review5 showed that, whilst women actually outnumbered men 60/40 in financial services as a whole, they were much less likely to be the managers or leaders who shaped the culture (Figure 1). And even when they were leaders, they were three times more likely to be running HR, communications or other support functions than serving in C-suite positions (Figure 2). Figure 1: Average representation of women in Financial Services in 20 global markets  Figure 2: Proportion of Executive Committee functions held by women  5  https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/assets/pdf/Virgin-Money-Empowering-Productivity-Report.pdf 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  3  Diversity is good for the bottom line  Disparities of this kind are unfair. They also make terrible business sense. Diversity improves financial performance: across the economy as a whole, firms with top-quartile executive-level diversity are 20-30% more likely to outperform their peers (Figure 3). And diversity reduces risk.