WEmF - Women in the Workplace Talk

Employment Rights Act 2025: Are We Creating Opportunity or Narrowing It?

In this special episode of FinTech's DEI Discussions, Nadia Edwards-Dashti shares insights from her appearance at the Westminster Business Forum webinar on Women in the Workplace. Drawing on more than 22 years of experience in recruitment across financial services, fintech, and technology, Nadia discusses the implications of the Employment Rights Act 2025 and what the legislation could mean for women, employers, hiring managers, and the wider workforce.

The conversation explores one of the most important challenges facing organisations today. While the intention behind the legislation is clear and positive, ensuring fairness, safety, flexibility, and opportunity for employees, there are concerns about how organisations will respond in practice. Through the lens of fintech recruitment, financial technology hiring, and talent acquisition, Nadia examines whether some of the changes could unintentionally create new barriers at the very moment businesses are trying to create more opportunity.

FinTech Diversity and Inclusion Requires More Than Good Intentions

Throughout her career, Nadia has focused on highly skilled and highly paid roles across financial services, fintech, and technology. During the discussion, she emphasises that inclusion and gender equality can no longer be viewed as optional initiatives. Instead, they must be considered business-critical priorities for organisations that want to remain competitive, innovative, and capable of attracting the best talent.

This perspective is particularly relevant within financial technology. Fintech sits at the intersection of two industries that have historically struggled with representation and progression for women. While many organisations have made significant commitments to diversity and inclusion, structural challenges remain.

The conversation highlights how difficult it can be for women not only to enter these sectors but also to progress and remain within them over the long term. This creates ongoing challenges for employers, talent leaders, and fintech recruitment specialists who are seeking to build diverse and sustainable teams.

Financial Technology Careers Still Face Structural Barriers

One of the most powerful sections of the discussion centres on the realities facing women within financial services and technology.

Nadia highlights that women account for approximately 28% of the fintech workforce and around 26% of technology hires. Within financial services more broadly, representation reaches around 40%, but the issue extends beyond hiring and into retention and progression.

Perhaps most concerning is the fact that technology continues to lose significant numbers of women during their careers. According to the figures referenced during the webinar, approximately half of women leave technology careers within eight years.

The conversation challenges the common assumption that these outcomes are purely the result of personal choices, family decisions, or motherhood. Instead, Nadia argues that organisations must look more closely at the systems that have been built around employees and ask whether they genuinely allow people to stay, develop, progress, and succeed equitably.

For employers operating within fintech, capital markets, payments, wealth management, and financial services technology, this remains one of the most important talent challenges facing the industry.

Why the Employment Rights Act 2025 Matters for FinTech Hiring

The Employment Rights Act 2025 introduces several changes designed to improve fairness and create stronger protections for employees.

During the discussion, Nadia welcomes these developments and describes many of the measures as both necessary and long overdue.

Flexible working provisions, day-one employment rights, parental leave protections, and wider workplace safeguards all contribute towards raising the baseline expectation of what good employment should look like in modern organisations.

Importantly, these measures also have the potential to address some of the structural challenges that have historically affected women and other underrepresented groups.

From a talent acquisition perspective, these developments could strengthen employee retention, improve workplace culture, and create environments where individuals feel safer and more supported throughout their careers.

For fintech employers competing for specialist talent, these factors are becoming increasingly important differentiators.

Recruitment Trends Show Employers Are Already Under Pressure

While supportive of the legislation, Nadia also provides important context regarding the current state of hiring.

Drawing on her visibility across approximately 150 companies each month and more than 1,000 interviews every quarter, she explains that recruitment markets remain under significant pressure.

The past several years have represented one of the most challenging hiring periods in recent memory. Organisations across financial services, fintech, technology, and capital markets have experienced sustained redundancies and increased economic uncertainty.

At the same time, more professionals than ever are competing for opportunities.

Although hiring activity has started to return in some areas, employers are approaching recruitment decisions with increasing caution. Every hire carries greater scrutiny, greater financial implications, and greater perceived risk.

This environment creates a critical backdrop for understanding how organisations may respond to employment legislation.

FinTech Recruitment Is Becoming More Risk Averse

One of the strongest themes throughout the discussion is the concept of risk aversion.

According to Nadia, many employers are concerned about the potential costs, complexity, and implementation challenges associated with the legislation.

These concerns are already influencing hiring behaviour.

Rather than recruiting for potential, organisations are increasingly looking for candidates who have performed exactly the same role previously. Hiring managers are prioritising certainty and familiarity over transferable skills and future potential.

Nadia describes this as organisations hiring "backwards rather than forwards."

The consequences of this shift can be significant.

When organisations focus exclusively on proven experience, opportunities become harder to access for career changers, returners, individuals with non-linear careers, and candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

The very people that inclusion initiatives are often designed to support can find themselves facing greater barriers to entry.

Diversity Hiring Risks Being Impacted by Unintended Consequences

A central message from the episode is that policy intentions and policy outcomes are not always the same.

The intention behind the Employment Rights Act is to improve fairness and create stronger protections. Nadia is clear that these objectives are positive and necessary.

However, she also warns that organisations may respond to perceived risk by introducing more scrutiny into hiring processes.

This can lead to longer recruitment cycles, more conservative shortlists, increased preference for familiar candidate profiles, and stronger bias towards individuals who resemble existing leadership teams.

In practical terms, this means fewer opportunities for people whose careers have followed different paths.

Returners, career pivoters, and individuals who have overcome barriers to enter the industry may face greater challenges in securing interviews.

As Nadia notes during the discussion, at the exact moment organisations are trying to create more opportunity, there is a danger that opportunity becomes narrower.

The Wider FinTech Market Cannot Be Ignored

The webinar also places the legislation within a broader economic and industry context.

Organisations are navigating geopolitical uncertainty, changing funding environments, cost-of-living pressures, leaner operating models, and a wider regression in some diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Many businesses are still recovering from difficult market conditions.

Against this backdrop, even positive policy changes can create hesitation if organisations feel unsupported in implementation.

For fintech leaders, this highlights the importance of understanding how legislation interacts with real-world hiring behaviours.

Creating change requires more than introducing new rules. It requires helping businesses understand how to implement those rules effectively without creating unintended consequences.

Retention and Inclusion Remain the Long-Term Goal

Despite the concerns discussed throughout the episode, Nadia remains optimistic about the potential impact of the legislation.

She repeatedly returns to the importance of fairness, safety, retention, and long-term career development.

The objective should not simply be getting more women into organisations. It should also be creating environments where women can thrive, progress into leadership positions, and build sustainable careers.

For fintech employers, this represents one of the most significant opportunities available today.

Organisations that genuinely invest in inclusive cultures, flexible working, career development, and employee wellbeing will continue to attract and retain the strongest talent.

These businesses will be better positioned to innovate, compete, and grow.

What FinTech Leaders Must Do Next

The concluding message from Nadia is that execution matters just as much as intention.

If policymakers, employers, and industry leaders want these changes to succeed, they must ensure that the people implementing them have the support, knowledge, and resources required to do so effectively.

More women need to be represented within policymaking discussions. More hiring managers need to contribute their practical experiences. More organisations need to share examples of what successful implementation looks like.

Most importantly, ongoing analysis is needed to understand how these changes are affecting different industries and different groups of people.

The goal should always be to remove barriers rather than accidentally create new ones.

FinTech Recruitment, Inclusion and Building Fairer Workplaces

This episode of FinTech's DEI Discussions provides a thoughtful and balanced examination of one of the most important workplace conversations facing financial services and technology today.

Nadia Edwards-Dashti explores both the opportunities and challenges presented by the Employment Rights Act 2025, offering a perspective informed by decades of experience in fintech recruitment, financial services hiring, and talent strategy.

Her message is ultimately one of optimism combined with realism. The intention behind these changes is strong. The ambition is right. The opportunity for progress is significant.

However, achieving meaningful change requires careful implementation, ongoing evaluation, and a commitment to understanding how policy decisions affect hiring behaviour in the real world.

As organisations continue to build more inclusive workplaces, attract diverse talent, and strengthen retention, the conversation remains focused on a simple but important objective: creating fairer careers without unintentionally narrowing opportunity.