On the go: Neurodiversity is “really important” to achieve diversity and inclusion in the pensions sector, according to David Fairs, executive director of regulatory policy, analysis and advice at the Pensions Regulator.
Speaking on Wednesday at a Pensions Management Institute webinar, Fairs explained that this is a key factor in promoting interesting debate and in achieving “interesting decisions”.
He said: “What you want around a trustee table is not for everybody to come with the same view, you want people to come with different perspectives, you want issues to be debated and challenged.
“That is how you are going to get to the best decisions by actually debating and challenging, so getting people who think very differently is going to improve decision making and governance.”
Fairs also noted that TPR’s internal approach to gender is to gender pay gap issues and is one they are “proud of”. However, he sees inclusion as a key area that needs to change for the regulator to improve.
“For some time, we have sat back and thought we are great because we do have that, but when you start to look at some of the other characteristics we are not where we would like to be,” he said.
“If you look at the senior management within TPR: we are white heterosexual, we don’t have good representation from the Bame [black, Asian and minority ethnic] community, we don’t have good representation from people who are other than heterosexual. So yes, there are some things we have done well, but we need to do a lot more.”
He added: “As you start to look at businesses you start to wonder why white men are always much more likely to get bonuses than black women, why women even when they are rated high performers will get lower bonuses.”
Remembering his days at KPMG, which he left in 2018 to join the regulator, Fairs noted that the company used to recruit “pretty much 50:50 men and women, but less than 20 per cent of partners were women and at the point I left we only had one black partner”.
He continued to raise questions regarding the unintended and unconscious decisions that people are making to reach these outcomes, stating: “If you sat all the partners round the table they’d all say they wanted equality and diversity — yet the results weren’t there.”
Lesley Alexander, president of the PMI, shares a similar view: “As I’m looking around I’m not seeing what I would consider to be a huge amount of diversity, and as president of the PMI — a body which is all about education and raising professional standards — I admit that it bothers me and I want to do something about it.”
