Derville Rowland: The importance of enhanced diversity and inclusion within the financial services sector

Remarks by Ms Derville Rowland, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, at Walkers Ireland, Dublin, 10 March 2023.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
14 March 2023

It is a pleasure to be with you today and I would like to thank Walkers Ireland for inviting me to speak to mark International Women's Week.

In my remarks this morning I will highlight the importance of equity – the central theme of International Women's Day.

Secondly, I will focus on the regulated financial services sector and the importance that we, the Central Bank, attach to ensuring that boards and leadership teams promote gender equality, diversity and inclusion. 

Finally I will discuss some of the internal work we are undertaking to promote diversity and inclusion within the Central Bank. 

Embracing equity

This year's theme for International Women's day is #EmbraceEquity.

It's fair to say that equality and equity are often used interchangeably, although they don't mean the same thing. 

The lawyers among us would be very familiar with the legal concept of equity, developed to address the fact that the initial English common law system was seen as rigid, inflexible and "incapable of reacting to provide a remedy for individual cases of injustice".

Equity has a power "to provide an ethic for imagining better law and better life", in the words of the legal scholar Gary Watt.