We know the benefits a diverse workforce and inclusive culture bring.  Our industry as a whole has a long way to go to achieve better ethnic and cultural diversity and inclusion.  At abrdn we’re focused on actions that are sustainable and systemic and improve outcomes for Black and ethnic minority colleagues.  We’re seeing great results, and we’re determined to continue to make progress.

What we’ve done in 2020-2021:

  • We’ve built global capability to collect diversity data to track progress and report our ethnicity pay gap, and we’ve encouraged our people to share their ethnicity through campaigns and blogs from colleagues
  • We’ve set our first target to increase representation of ethnic minority colleagues and committed to set more when we have built more data
  • We’ve trained colleagues to work effectively and build teams across different cultures with new global workshops
  • We’re raising awareness and celebrating multiculturalism through events
  • Our executive leadership team have taken part in 6 months of reverse mentoring with ethnic minority colleagues, and reverse mentoring is now being made available to all colleagues
  • We’ve introduced inclusive recruitment practices, including a diverse interview pool, and using augmented software to make adverts inclusive and jargon free, so that they’re more easily understood by people who do not have English as a first language
  • We’re working with partners to reach ethnic minority candidates who might not have been attracted to work in asset management, such as #10,000BlackInterns, Black Professionals Scotland, Catalyst After Schools Program and SEO London – Her Capital
  • We’ve shared our detailed ethnic minority data (for UK and US) because we believe transparency helps drive progress, and are now encouraging others to do the same
  • We’ve committed to working with minority owned businesses in our supply chain

which has resulted in:

  • Ethnic minority representation in graduate intake (UK) increased from 21% (2020) to 32% (2021)
  • Ethnic minority representation in UK workforce increased from 4% (2020) to 5% (2021)
  • Proportion of colleagues sharing their diversity data increased from 55% (2020) to 60% (2021)
  • Appointment of our first minority owned supplier as part of the diverse supplier initiative

You’ll find more information about our ethnicity target here, and details of the progress we’ve made through our ethnicity action plan in the 2021 Diversity and Inclusion Report.

Race and ethnicity pledges and commitments

Working with others to make progress is important to us. We were one of the inaugural signatories to the Race at Work Charter in 2018, and following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, our chief executive officer Stephen Bird became a signatory to the open letter on Black inclusion (by Audeliss and Involve). We’re proud to be part of the Corporate Call to Action: Coalition for Equity & Opportunity (CCA) in the US, a corporate social justice initiative launched in September 2020 by the Connecticut Office of the Treasurer in partnership with the Ford Foundation. In 2021, we joined the Change the Race Ratio pledge, a CBI/Investment Association collaboration of employers to make progress on ethnic minority representation beyond Board level.