The Football Leadership Diversity Code was developed in collaboration with club executives, players, coaches, HR directors, media and leaders across the game to ensure English football better represents modern society, by improving the representation of diverse groups across senior leadership positions, wider team operations and coaching roles.
The aim of the code is to move away from recruitment practices focused on personal networks, which is a longstanding challenge across football and has limited the diversity in leadership across the game. Focusing instead on increasing the equality of opportunity with hiring targets – rather than quotas – to encourage recruitment from across society. Hiring will be based on merit, to find the best person for the job from diverse talent pipelines.
Having signed the code, Wolves committed to providing annual progress reports to increase accountability and transparency, which can be found here.
Wolves HR director and club equality lead, Zoe Brough, said: “We are particularly proud of hitting our recruitment targets for the numbers of females within women’s coaching, team operations and senior leadership.
“Our focus is now on increasing equality of opportunity for male and female black, Asian and mixed heritage candidates and ensuring that we start to reflect our modern and diverse community.
“We recognise we have work to do in advertising in the right places to attract a diverse pipeline.
“Whilst the performance in some key areas are disappointing to us, we take encouragement from the fact that we are regularly shortlisting diverse candidates and awareness is the first step to progression.”
Wolves continues to promote equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) throughout the club, with the topics firmly on the agenda at the club and is a quarterly agenda item in the senior leadership team meetings, where reporting of data, good news stories and improvements to be made are all presented.
The club also recently conducted a staff equal opportunity survey which positively highlighted the increased representation of staff in all reporting categories since the 2018/19 season.
Wolves’ EDI working group has grown since signing up to the code, to include more members spanning wider reaches of the club, while an equality advisory group, made up of external people who can advise and scrutinise, is to be launched in the spring.
For more information on the FA's Football Leadership Diversity Code, click here.
