A third of the workforce (33%) at the Financial Conduct Authority were from an ethnic minority in 2023-24, according to new employment data from the regulator.

In 2021 the regulator set itself a target of 25% minority ethnic representation across all teams, other than the senior leadership team which has a target of 20% by 2025.

Despite beating its overall target, there was still a shortfall in senior staff numbers reaching ethnicity targets.

Technical specialists (22%), managers (18%) and the senior leadership team (14%) were much less likely to come from an ethnic minority.

However, there has been an increase in all of these grades from last year with the manager level increasing 3%, and the technical specialist level increasing 3.5%.

This compared with 43% of associates, 32% of the professional support team, and 33% of senior and lead associates.

The 2021 ambitions also set a 50% target for women across all grades.

The FCA had a mostly balanced gender representation in 2023-24, with slightly more female (52%) than male (48%) workers.

However, there were some roles where different genders were more dominant. For example, 94% of the professional support team at the regulator during the year were female, whereas 69% of the technical specialist team were male.

For the management teams, the senior leadership had an exact 50/50 gender balance whereas 56% of the less senior managers were male.

However, much progress has been made since the regulator signed the Women in Finance Charter in 2016 when its female senior leadership team representation was 39%.

For 2023-24 the data showed that 6% of the regulator’s workforce identified as disabled.

In terms of beliefs, the majority of the FCA workforce said they considered themselves to be atheist with no religion or belief. The most highly represented religions were Christianity (29%) and Muslim (8%).

The majority of the workforce identified as heterosexual/straight (76%), with 4% identifying as gay and 2% as bisexual. Less than 1% identified as trans.

Just over a third of the workforce (38%) were married or in a civil partnership, with 17% single.

During the 2023-24 period, 102 women took maternity leave, 62 men took paternity leave and 21 workers took shared parental leave.

When trying to identify their workforce’s socio-economic background the FCA asked the occupation of their main household earner when they were 14 years old.

The majority of those who answered the question said they were from a professional or higher socio-economic background (31%), with 9% coming from an ‘intermediate’ background, and 12% coming from a working class or lower socio-economic background.