Equity, Diversity & Inclusion: Driving inclusive change

14 Jun 2021

Driven by our employees’ and leaders’ great intentions and mindsets, our progress on equity, diversity and inclusion over the last year was marked by accelerated impact.

We witnessed first-hand the power and potential of our employees’ energy to make change happen in our growing Employee Resource Group footprint, in the increasing reach of our Ally Training Programme, and in the progress towards our gender parity goal in leadership roles.

Our progress

Allies in progressing our culture

Our Employee Resource Groups play an important role in connecting underrepresented groups across the Company, prioritising support and solidarity, and cultivating a sense of belonging at Tate & Lyle.

We have three groups – the Professional Women’s Network, the LGBTQ+ Network and, launched this year, the Black Employee Network. To magnify the impact of these important communities, and to ensure equity, diversity and inclusion is at the heart of our culture, we launched Ally Training to create ‘allies’ – people who use their influence to support those who experience unequal treatment.

This year we trained more than 228 employees, including our Executive team, on how to be an ally. This training empowered many employees to begin their inclusion learning journeys and to take personal ownership of our equity, diversity and inclusion agenda.

Binary gender diversity

We are pleased with the representation of women on our Board (36%*) and Executive Committee (44%*). But we still have much to do at the next level, hence our target for gender parity in leadership roles by 2025. We define leadership roles as the top three employee bands. We made solid progress in the year, increasing the number of women in leadership roles from 27% to 32%. We have 136 senior managers, including statutory directors, of whom 24% (33) are women.

Looking ahead, areas of focus include our senior plant management where we lack representation of women. We are committed to measuring and reporting our progress and to expanding our representation goals.

Gender pay gap reporting

Although we are below the legislative threshold for UK gender pay reporting, we voluntarily publish details of our gender pay gap on our website annually. Using the UK government’s methodology, our median gender pay gap for UK employees was 3.2% (2020 – 15%). We expect this gap to narrow even further as we increase the number of women in leadership roles to achieve our target of gender parity by 2025.

Our ambitions and key priorities

Our future potential is reflected in our decision to expand our nomenclature to now refer to this work as Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (ED&I). How do we think about ED&I? We see driving equity as our impact, fostering local diversity as a fact, and conscious inclusion as an act.

We have an opportunity and an obligation to ensure our progress is both interpersonal and institutional by weaving ED&I into our culture and purpose. The pillars we will focus on in the future are:

Talent: Ensure the diversity of our workforce reflects the local communities we call home.
Culture: Educate all to achieve the ED&I competence and confidence needed to create and sustain an inclusive culture where diversity thrives, unlocks innovation and maximises our business’ global growth.
Systems: Integrate ED&I into core organisational policies and practices to promote equitable advancement, retention and reward.
Society: Listen to, speak to and serve society by promoting ED&I progress for our customers, communities and supply chain.

We want equity, diversity and inclusion to be at the heart of our culture. That is why we aspire for all our employees to be seen, heard and valued, and for our teams to reflect the local communities we call home. We are committed to making change happen.

_{*as of June 2021}