At Form3 we are super passionate about gender diversity. Unfortunately, as a technology company, achieving a 50/50 split of male and female employees has proven to be extremely difficult.  Ensuring that men become allies and join the journey to gender equality is key, so we are very proud to have a leadership team that is passionate about making changes in our industry as well as at Form3.

 Last International Women’s Day, we published our diversity statistics and set out a plan to improve them. Now, almost a year later, we would like to show our progress, our changes, and the next steps in our mission to promote gender diversity, not only at Form3, but also within the industry.

In 2019, women represented 19% of our business, 33% of the leadership team and 0% of the Board of Directors. In 2020 females represented 22% of our business, 42% of our leadership team and 20% of our Board of Directors. In 2021 we have females in 25 % of the business and 33 % of our leadership team and 33% of our Board of Directors. Good progress, but there is still a long way to go! Form3 is very much committed to creating a business that is more representative of the world’s population year on year. Our hope by the end of 2022 is that female representation will grow to 28% overall in the business.

Earlier in 2021, we formed relationships with social partners who are non-profit organisations trying to address the gender imbalance in technology. With these partnerships we hope to make the fintech community more inclusive and help people from all backgrounds enter and thrive in the technology space.  We have teamed up with two social partners, one predominantly based in Germany (ReDi school), and one based in the UK and Ireland (Stemettes). Through their initiatives, they encourage people from populations typically underrepresented in engineering to study, work and explore the world of technology. Our partnerships give us the opportunity to not only donate money and equipment, but to also get involved with mentoring, career coaching, and teaching coding lessons.  

 Additionally, we have recently launched our entry level hiring programme, which will give young people an opportunity to kick start their career with us. Within the programme, we offer apprenticeship and junior roles across the business. Here, we are especially trying to give girls the opportunity to gain experience in tech roles such as cyber security and IT.

Lastly, to ensure that enough females are being considered for every role, we have implemented an internal rule, which ensures that females are included in each interview shortlist. With this we aim to improve the gender inequality in the tech space in the coming years.  

A big focus point for the next year is transparency. By Q2 2022, we want to publish our gender pay gap data, regardless of our headcount, to ensure that we are holding ourselves accountable to monitoring and minimising it. As we continue to grow, our focus will be improving the gender quota in line with our values.

We will continue to provide updates and are excited to see more diversity not just within Form3 but in the whole technology space! We are all on this mission together to create an organisation and an industry that is far more representative of the global population than it is right now.