DWP Digital are driving forward digital transformation for the Department for Work and Pensions, the UK’s biggest public service department. DWP is committed to the Civil Service ambition to become the UK’s most inclusive employer and has a department-wide commitment to gender parity.

Having made a pledge of inclusion through the Tech Talent Charter for the 5thyear running, we s believe that a diverse workforce brings greater innovation, and creativity through valuing our differences and working collaboratively. We need diversity in leadership to shape the organisation direction and represent all citizens we serve.

We take an intersectional evidence-based approach to increase diversity of leadership, using data, analytics, and insight from various sources, including our annual colleague people survey, recruitment data, and career development survey. We use this to identify challenges and opportunities to provide a targeted diversity of leadership initiative with various strands including networks, recruitment, pay and leadership programmes.

Over the last 5 years, representation of women at SCS level has increased from 39% to 50%. With recruitment solely based on anonymous applications, we know this improvement can be directly linked to our actions. We’re particularly proud of this achievement for a huge scale organisation with a large leadership team.

In 2023, DWP Digital won Company of the Year at TechWomen100 awards and Employer of the Year at Women in IT awards.

We pride ourselves on being family-friendly, offering flexible and hybrid working options to make sure leaders have a positive work-life balance. For example, Director Cheryl Steven’s working pattern is part time. This encourages women within our organisation to strive for promotion, not held back by childcare responsibilities.

In the Civil Service, we’ve tackled pay inequalities due to our band system, with DWP salaries available publicly. Salary bands provide consistency and fairness.

Civil Service recruitment is fair and open as a legal requirement. This means promotions are not determined internally subject to bias, all roles must be advertised externally. To reduce the risk of bias and creating a fairer system, we analysed our recruitment process through research and insights, removing gender focused language in job specifications, and have used a ‘name blind recruitment’ policy since 2015.

Continuing this focus on recruitment, we are encouraging unrepresented groups to volunteer to join recruitment panels to shape the leadership community and we run a Disability Confident Scheme, candidates who meet the minimum selection criteria for a role are guaranteed an interview.