EY’s commitment to anti-racism in the UK

We recognise that this is a painful time for millions of people around the world. We see systemic racism, discrimination and injustice, along with the individual experience of racism as a human rights issue. We vow to be a voice and force for change, both within our own organisation and in society more widely.

We know that the experience of our Black colleagues, and those from other ethnic groups, is not the same as that of our White colleagues. We will not rest until EY is truly diverse and inclusive for all. We will not tolerate racism at EY. We will do more and we will do it faster.

Over the past month, we have started the conversation with our people, and it is increasingly evident that we haven’t done enough. Strong leadership from EY’s Race & Ethnicity Network and the EY Black Community has elevated the voices of our colleagues to share how discrimination and racism show up in our workplace.  

We will work more closely with our people to ensure that the actions we take will create lasting cultural change at pace, especially for our Black colleagues. We start with the following commitments and will continue to build our plan.

1. Under our differential focus on Race and Gender we have a target of 40% female Partners and 20% BAME Partners by 2025. We recognise the significance and importance of representation at senior levels in the firm and commit 15% of our BAME target to be Black Partners.
2. We will conduct an end to end review of our Talent processes and make the changes necessary to ensure fair and equal outcomes for Black - and all - employees. This will encompass work on: career paths and utilisation; belonging; training and development; recruitment practices; performance reviews, sponsorship & progression; exit interviews; grievance/complaints handling; everyday actions and behaviours; understanding barriers and working to eliminate them.
3. We will avoid using the BAME category as far as practically possible when we scrutinise the experience of our people in the UK Firm. Instead we will use the UK census ethnicity categories, calling out Black and other representation, to seek to truly understand all our employees.
4. We will continue to invest in enabling all of our people to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of the topic of race through Race Fluency and Allyship training. Our path to success will come through our White colleagues truly understanding the impact of the (often invisible) advantages granted to them and committing to drive and enable the changes that need to be made at an organisational and individual level, and not by disproportionately burdening our Black colleagues with driving change.
5. We already publish our ethnicity pay gap and we now commit to publish our Black pay gap annually together with a report into the actions we are taking to close any gaps and the progress made. It will be released in Autumn 2020 as part of our ethnicity pay gap reporting.
6. We will offer at least 30% of the work experience places in EY on our Smart Futures/Our Futures programmes to Black young people for the next five years, starting in FY21.  We will set ourselves a target to offer entry into EY school leaver pathways to at least 30% of Black young alumni of the Smart Futures/Our Futures programmes, for the next five years.
7. We will support and fund the EY Foundation, our independent charity in the UK, to conduct a survey of Black young people (18-24 years old) to better understand access to employment opportunities and the challenges they face. This will be published and used to help guide further action we could take together. 

In addition, we re-affirm our continued commitment to these actions:

• Financially support the Parker Review in its important work to achieve ethnicity representation on FTSE250 Boards and improve reporting of Black representation. We will also commit to reviewing the diversity of the EY LLP Board in line with our differential focus on Race and Gender.
• Focus on the accelerated development and progression of our ethnic minority senior managers through investment in our Future Leaders Programme (FLP). We will continue to invite all our Black senior managers to participate in this programme and increase the number of participants in the programme from 65 (2019) to 100 (2020) and the number of authentic allies will correspondingly increase to 200.
• Deliver the Discover EY-Black Heritage in Business insight programme to Black students in their first year of University. 
• Develop insights through research partners into the lived experience of professional Black employees in EY and across UK workplaces. We will make these insights publicly available to inform wider thinking and social change. 

We are listening to how our Black colleagues feel and we will do more, and do so faster, to ensure that we are living up to EY’s values. We recognise that there are other minorities and that all of us are made up of many differences, so will continue with our broader D&I commitments and agenda. In doing this, we will hold ourselves accountable to the people, businesses and communities we serve. 

We all have a part to play to ensure our firm commitments can be achieved so please support us in accelerating change. 

Together we can make a real difference.