By Anjuli Davies
LONDON, March 22 (Reuters) - There is no "magic bullet" toget more women into senior roles in the finance industry, aBritish government-sponsored review said on Tuesday, urgingcompanies to sign up to a set of voluntary proposals to improvetheir gender balance.
Virgin Money Chief Executive Jayne-Anne Gadhia ledthe review as part of a drive to increase economic productivityin Britain. According to an OECD estimate, labour market genderequality could boost British GDP by 10 percent by 2030.
The four main planks of Gadhia's report are included in avoluntary Charter for which Virgin Money and a number of rivalbanks will sign up.
They recommend that internal targets be set for genderdiversity in senior management, that pay packages be linked to afirm's gender balance, that companies appoint an executiveresponsible for gender, diversity and inclusion, and thatcompanies report gender statistics publicly.
However, the review stopped short of recommending any formaltargets or the introduction of quotas.
"In the end, we did not find a magic bullet. Allorganisations are different and have differing priorities. Allindividuals necessarily have different requirements and views," Gadhia wrote in the report.
Besides Virgin Money, representatives from Lloyds BankingGroup, Barclays, HSBC and the RoyalBank of Scotland will also commit to improving genderdiversity in their firms.
"It is fantastic that a number of leading banks have alreadycommitted to sign up to our new Women in Finance Charter and Iencourage all firms across the sector to follow suit," saidHarriett Baldwin, Economic Secretary to the Treasury.
The Treasury will publish a list of the firms who havesigned up to the Charter after three months.
Women are still underrepresented in Britain's financialservices industry, making up only 14 percent of executivecommittees in 2015, according to research for the review.
In Britain, women in financial services on average earned 55percent less annually than their male counterparts, a reportfrom the Equality and Human Rights Commission showed, comparedto an economy-wide pay gap of 28 percent across all industries.
In Britain, some progress towards greater equality has beenmade across industries as a whole over the past five years.
Women now account for 26 percent of board positions in theFTSE 100, up from 12.5 percent in 2010, anothergovernment-sponsored report, the Davies Review, found inOctober.
(Editing by Keith Weir)