Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy is centred on three key pillars:

• Foster care, equality and respect: We’re committed to care, equality and respect and the role they play in helping our people and our customers feel safe and included.
• Strengthen courageous inclusive decision-making: We listen to our people and our customers’ experiences and regularly review metrics and decisions to ensure they are fair and equitable.
• Amplify impact and deliver on our commitments: We partner with community organisations and academic experts to ensure our approach is evidence-based and share what we’ve learned together to accelerate positive outcomes.

The strategy is grounded in primary prevention, addressing attitudes, behaviours and norms that perpetuate inequality. Respect Lives Here is our key prevention initiative designed to help us build a shared understanding of respectful and disrespectful behaviours at work, the impacts they have, and the practical actions our people can take to be effective bystanders when they see or hear something that does not feel right.

Respect Lives Here is informed by our people’s lived experiences, and draws on the evidenced-based work of Our Watch, Griffith University and the University of New South Wales. Through education and leader-led discussions, Respect Lives Here addresses the attitudes, behaviours and standards that enable our people to foster a positive team culture and prevent harmful behaviours, such as sexual harassment or marginalisation at work.

Learn more about how we are supporting our customers and the communities that we serve. 

We set goals to support our commitment to advance gender and cultural representation across leadership roles, and to achieve Indigenous employment parity. Our Accessibility and Inclusion Strategy outlines our commitment to improving accessibility for people with disability, people who are neurodivergent and carers.

Our goals may be reviewed and changed from time-to-time. Currently, they are:

• Gender diversity in leadership: having achieved our 2020 goals, we now aspire for Executive Manager roles and above to reflect the Australian working population for women. We have set a goal of achieving 47% –50% gender equality in Executive Manager and above roles by 2025; a goal that is gender inclusive to consider people who do not identify with a binary gender (male or female). Learn more about gender diversity at CommBank.
• Gender diversity on our boards: The CBA Board and the boards of all key operating subsidiaries and APRA regulated entities will achieve 40% female membership, 40% male membership and 20% of any gender that holds the relevant skills and experience. For all other Group subsidiaries, board diversity must be considered on incorporation, director renewal and director rotation with the intention of ensuring that overall 40% female membership is achieved.
• Gender diversity in our workforce: we aim to maintain no less than 50% female representation in CBA’s workforce overall.
• Cultural diversity in leadership: we aim for cultural diversity of our senior leaders to match the cultural diversity of the Australian population (as measured by CBA’s Cultural Diversity Index) by 2025. 
• Indigenous employment parity: we’re committed to increasing employment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to be at parity with the Australian population. We aim to achieve 3% Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander representation in our domestic workforce by December 2026.
• Accessibility: Our Accessibility and Inclusion Strategy 2024–2026 (PDF) is our public commitment to accessibility and inclusion. It outlines the achievements that we made under the 2021-2023 plan, and the steps we’re taking now. You can also read the Accessibility and Inclusion Strategy 2024–2026 in Easy English (PDF). This version provides easy to understand and concise information for people with low English literacy. Visit commbank.com.au/accessibility for more information. 

As part of our commitment to transparency and disclosure of our diversity, equity and inclusion activities, we report our progress against our key goals, initiatives and measures, including goals for the previous financial year in our Annual Report.

2023 Financial Year: Key Diversity Metrics

As at 30 June 2023, women represented:

• 44.0% of Executive Manager and above roles, compared to 43.1% as at 30 June 2022.
• 45.1% of Manager and above roles, compared to 45.5% as at 30 June 2022.
• 54.4% of our overall workforce, compared to 55.2% as at 30 June 2022.

As self-nominated in the Group’s annual people and culture survey in September 2022:

• The Bank’s Australian workforce continues to be more culturally diverse than the Australian population (based on the Australian census). However, we still have more work to do at General Manager and above roles where we’re not as diverse as the Australian population.
• 1.0% of our workforce most strongly identified with Australian Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander ancestry.
• 7.6% of our employees identified as living with a disability.
• 5.1% of our employees identified as LGBTI and/or gender non-binary.
• 84.9% of our employees worked flexibly.
• 59.4% of our employees had caring responsibilities.

Refer to our 2023 CBA Annual Report for more information on our progress and diversity metrics.