About Barclays
Barclays is a major global financial services provider engaged in personal banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking and wealth and investment management with an extensive international presence in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

With over 300 years of history and expertise in banking, Barclays operates in over 50 countries and employs approximately 140,000 people. Barclays moves, lends, invests and protects money for customers and clients worldwide.

For further information about Barclays, please visit our website www.barclays.com.

What Women of the Year means to us
The Women of the Year Lunch is about recognising outstanding women whose drive and energy have made a huge impact whatever their expertise. At Barclays, our employees’ commitment to serving the needs of our customers, whatever the situation, is the single most important ingredient of our success. The Lunch inspired our internal Women of the Year Awards programme, which is now in its sixth year. Through the awards we recognise talented women employees and showcase role models across the organisation.

Barclays and Women of the Year 2012
Barclays has a clear sense of its business purpose – to help individuals, communities, businesses and economies grow.

We use the term citizenship to capture this purpose; a term which also encompasses our focus on diversity and inclusion.

We have a Global Diversity and Inclusion strategy in place across the business, sponsored by the Barclays Executive Diversity Group. The strategy is to make sure that we recruit, retain and promote talent within the business, irrespective of their style, personality, age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

A central tenet of this strategy is that across Barclays we want to see more women represented in senior roles. While we recognise this is a challenge faced by the financial sector as a whole, we’re determined to do all we can to enable women to fulfil their career potential at Barclays.

As part of this, Women’s Initiative Networks have been established by colleagues all over the world and our internal Barclays Women of the Year Awards recognise exceptional personal and professional achievements from our female colleagues globally, as well as recognising male colleagues who advocate and support female career advancement.

As a business, we also actively champion the recommendations of the Davies report on improving the gender balance on the Boards of the FSTE 350, increasing the representation of women to at least 20% by the end of 2013, and to more than 25% by the end of 2015.

Barclays is also continuing its multiyear sponsorship of the Cranfield University Female FSTE Board Report, and has been voted in The Times Top 50 places to work for Women for 6 consecutive years.

Citizenship for Barclays means focussing on three core objectives: the way we do business, which includes promoting diversity and equality, how we contribute to growth and how we support the communities in which we live and work.

We recognise that we have a long way to go to restore trust and deliver our Citizenship Agenda. As part of that, we understand that we must demonstrate the ways in which Barclays intends to make, and is making, Citizenship real for all our stakeholders, customers, colleagues, communities, shareholders and other opinion formers.

To ensure we deliver on our promise, we have produced a Citizenship Plan that outlines how we will deliver on these three objectives:

Contributing To Growth: We support economic growth and job creation by operating a strong, profitable business that is focussed on helping individuals, businesses, institutions and Governments pursue their goals.

The Way We Do Business: We put our clients’ interests at the heart of everything we do. We seek to reinforce our business integrity everyday by striving to improve the service we provide, making responsible decisions in how we manage the business, and actively managing the social and environmental impacts of everything we do.

Supporting Our Communities: We play a broader role in the communities in which we live and work beyond what we deliver through core business activities. We do this through community investment programmes and the direct efforts of our colleagues.

You can read the full report, and see how Barclays are working to meet our goals, here

 Proud sponsors of the Women of the Year Lunch

Click here to show your support for the 2012 Women of the Year event >