IWD: Accelerating action in leasing

As a marketing leader, International Women’s Day stands out as an essential awareness day in the business calendar.  It’s easy to be cynical about yet another campaign day. You only have to look at the flooded content feeds on LinkedIn as organisations gently congratulate themselves on how much they’re supporting their female employees to question how much progress is genuine.

IWD’s 2025 theme is “accelerating action” for gender equality. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that at the current rate of progress, it will take until 2158 – roughly five generations from now – to reach full gender parity.

These figures can feel daunting. But by focusing on how we accelerate action, we can take swift and decisive steps to get closer to gender equality, tackling the systemic barriers and biases that women face, in their personal and professional environments.

Changing an industry narrative

Working in finance, there’s a common narrative that it’s hard for women to succeed in our industry. And while clear evidence still points to multiple examples of this across the sector – from gender pay gaps through to career velocity and senior representation- at grenke UK we’re truly proud of the work we’ve done to change this story. Some highlights include:  

• As of January 2025, 64% of all our staff were women.
• We’ve worked hard to achieve parity at a leadership level: out of 20 team leaders, 9 are women, meaning 47% of our leadership team is female.
• Across our London network, we have 3 female branch leaders, showing that women are not just part of finance, but are in fact, leading the way.
• When it comes to key departments like marketing, underwriting, HR, legal, admin, and procurement, they’re all entirely run by women.
• Even in sales, which is traditionally seen as a male-dominated field, we’re breaking barriers. Out of 62 salespeople, 33 are women, meaning 54% of our sales team is female.

While we know, there’s plenty more work to be done, there are steps all organisations in leasing can be taking – from cultural changes through to training – to ensure they are accelerating action to support women in the workplace.

Accelerating action every day

There is a range of ways to encourage equality in your workplace. These are the steps that worked for grenke UK.

Access to flexibility

While the battle between return to office and work from home rages, changes in our culture mean that flexible working is more accessible. There’s the legal element too: last year saw the introduction of day one right to request flexible working arrangements – for all employees. This then has to be embedded into the workplace culture – so parents can leave the office at 3pm to make the school run without feeling judged. It’s also essential this is applied to all team members, not just a select senior few.

There’s a need to normalise career breaks too, to make sure your organisation has the policies and processes in place so that new parents feel confident when they leave an organisation – for maternity leave, for example – and comfortable when they return. Keep in touch days, support networks, actionable flexible working options are all part of this.

The role of modelling

Key to grenke UK’s success has been the role of modelling across our branches and in our head office. Because we have senior women in role, this means that younger women coming into the business can see that someone has trod a particular path before them, they can see what’s possible and recognise that with the right skills and mindset, what’s also possible for them. This is also key to retention of female talent – women can look up and see that they could be in these senior roles in time. It means that we can also build a fuller female talent pipeline within the organisation.

Build allyship

When it comes to embedding culture, we’ve found that building allyship at all levels has helped strengthen how we support women at grenke UK. A member of our senior management was a single dad raising his son and juggling his own career path so having that empathy and understanding meant going far beyond a buzzword; it meant we had a senior male leader committed to wanting to help his female colleagues. We know that allyship is vital to how a workplace approaches equality and change. You can do this by investing in one to-one relationships with female colleagues, understanding the issues they truly care about and making a point of keeping opportunities open.

Encourage women’s networks

Despite achieving this direction of travel towards more parity at grenke UK, I’ve found myself having conversations with female colleagues as to how she’s navigated a specific challenge with a male customer. Or found herself leaning into a particular skillset when negotiating a pay-rise, for example. Being seen, heard and understood in these places of psychological safety can have a profound effect on women in the workplace – knowing you’re not alone in your mum guilt, say, or indeed your ambitions for your career. At grenke UK, we’re looking to strengthen the way we support industry -wide networks within leasing to support our female colleagues in the future. Watch this space!

Our figures show that women don’t only succeed in finance, but with the right culture, support and training, they can thrive. And while we know that accelerating action is essential for more enduring equity, diversity and inclusion – across all marginalised groups – leasing is a sector where talent, drive and application, not gender, can determine women’s success.