Copenhagen Pride Week is a celebration of diversity and the right to be yourself, regardless of your gender and sexual orientation. At Danske Bank, we want to support this message, because we see diversity among our staff as a strength and a key part of offering the best possible customer experiences. With more than 20,000 employees, almost three million customers and a presence in 16 countries, a diversity of backgrounds, languages and perspectives is already a large part of our daily lives.  







A range of activities
This year, Danske Bank will celebrate Copenhagen Pride with a range of activities. Among other things, we will decorate our main building at Kongens Nytorv and our Vesterport branch in Copenhagen, both of which are located on the Pride route. A procession of almost 300 employees and family members, including several people from Danske Bank’s senior management, will participate in the parade with the slogan ‘Free to be Me’. Finally, we’re sponsoring Copenhagen Pride, and throughout the week we will mark the event internally with presentations by external guest speakers focusing on diversity.

Slowly but surely        
The formal guideline for our work on ensuring diversity among our staff and reflecting society as a whole is our diversity and inclusion policy, and our annual Corporate Social Responsibility report gives an account of how successful our initiatives have been. 

In the last two years we have particularly focused on increasing the number of women in management through our recruitment processes and work on succession and talent development; we see this area as a good starting point for promoting diversity. And with women making up 37% of Danske Bank’s managers, we are close to reaching our target of 38-40%.

But we still have a lot of work ahead of us. For example, there are no women on the Executive Board, and we have had to adjust our short term goal to 25% women in 2020, while maintaining the long term goal of 38-40%. Also, five out of 12 members of our Board of Directors are women, but three of these have been elected by the employees. 

We also send an annual report on the monitoring of possible pay differences between men and women to the Danish Employers’ Association for the Financial Sector, diversity is part of the management’s KPIs in several areas and in a project in Sweden in 2018, all newly hired managers were given training in inclusivity.