The project encourages media organisations to monitor how often they include female contributors with the aim of creating a greater diversity of voices which better reflect audiences.
What Mortgage, along with its sister website, The Money Pages, will be collecting data on the gender balance of our experts, contributors and commentators every month.
Miranda Holt, external partners lead for the BBC’s 50:50 Equality Project said: “We’re so excited that ‘What Mortgage’ is the latest title from the EMAP empire to implement 50:50.
“You join 690 BBC Teams and 120 companies around the world who follow this simple way of counting data to effect change.
“By increasing the number of women featured in content of this kind, especially in financial advice that affects so many people buying property, we better reflect the society we live in.”
As a consumer publication which helps homebuyers and remortgagers find the best mortgage and associated financial products and services, What Mortgage aims to source the industry’s best experts and professionals to arm readers with the most comprehensive facts and information when they make the biggest purchase of their lives.
But we also believe it’s vital those professionals and experts represent our society, our audience and the industry too. Therefore we were interested to dig deeper into the personal finance sector to learn more about the gender balance.
The Building Societies Association (BSA), which represents a number of mortgage lenders and savings providers, has been supportive in helping us understand more about this.
According to a survey of its members in November 2020, women currently comprise 35% of non-executive board directors and 25% of executive board directors.
Women made up 45% of employees in roles which reported directly to the CEO and other executive directors.
As for employees in senior roles such as heads of department or specialist roles (not including assistants and support staff) 50% were female.
This is just one section of the financial services market, but it provides a snapshot of how gender is balanced in this area of the mortgage market.
The BSA said 18 of its members had signed up to the Women In Finance Charter to implement recommendations made to increase representation of women in senior roles.
You can find out more about the 50:50 Project here.
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