Guidance

Automatically consider eligible employees for promotion

Published 4 March 2026

Applies to England, Scotland and Wales

Purpose of this action

The aim of this action is to improve gender diversity across your organisation. It may help to increase the number of women who apply for and are chosen for promotions. This action is not about targeting or favouring specific groups, but widening the pool of candidates who choose to take part in the selection process.

You may want to choose this action if you have low rates of women:

• moving into senior roles
• staying in employment with your organisation

It might also be useful if you have a difference in the number of men and women in senior roles.

Benefits and evidence

We currently have less high-quality evidence supporting this action than other actions. We are actively building our evidence base, and will continue to review and update this action. From April 2026, organisations will be able to share evidence with us about evidence-based actions to support this process.

Allowing employees to ‘opt out’ of a promotion process – rather than putting themselves forward – may help you promote people based on their skills. This is an alternative to the typical requirement for staff to self-nominate or be selected by a manager for promotion.  Some research suggests this may help more women reach leadership roles, and could help reduce your gender pay gap.^{[footnote 1]}

Some evidence suggests women are less likely than men to put themselves forward for leadership roles.^{[footnote 2]}  This may happen even when women are told they are the top performers in their group.^{[footnote 3]} You may be able to reduce the difference in application rates between men and women by putting all eligible employees forward for promotion.^{[footnote 4]}

Other benefits may include:

• increasing your talent pool so you can find the best person for the role
• making better use of the staff you already have, including retaining specialist and institutional knowledge
• spending less on recruitment costs by promoting existing employees
• improving staff morale and retention by showing you are committed to their success

Implementing this action

If you choose to use this action, you should:

• set a clear, organisation-wide criteria to decide who is eligible for promotion based on their skills, seniority and performance, not targeted towards any specific group
• seek views from people across your organisation to help avoid setting an unnecessarily narrow criteria, or criteria that may unintentionally exclude eligible people
• tell all employees why you are starting the new policy and how it works, including the assessment process
• give clear instructions on how an employee can opt out or withdraw
• tell candidates they are being considered because they have the right skills and the organisation believes they are suitable
• ensure employees know there are no consequences if they opt out or withdraw
• explain how staff can opt back in later if their personal circumstances change
• give eligible employees time during their working day to prepare for assessments, interviews and any other related activities – this can help prevent people from opting out because of outside commitments
• make sure those involved in the selection process are not aware of whether an applicant was opted in or not

Tracking progress

You might want to consider tracking the progress of this action by measuring:

• the rate in which employees progress from middle to senior management over time, with a specific focus on sex
• the breakdown of all applicants and successful candidates by sex – including the combination of sex and other characteristics (such as ethnicity or disability status) to highlight specific trends for different groups of men and women
• the retention of employees
• candidates’ experience of the promotion process

Where possible, you should compare any data you gather with ‘baseline’ data from previous years.

Data privacy

Some or all of the equality information you collect is likely to be ‘special category personal data’, meaning it has special legal protections. 

Ensure that you are complying with the UK’s data protection legislation when you collect and analyse employees’ data.

Get advice and approval from your organisation’s privacy or data protection expert before you start.

1. Bosquet C, Combes P and García-Peñalosa C (2018). Gender and promotions: Evidence from academic economists in France. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 121(3), 1020-1053. ↩

2. The Behavioural Insights Team (2025). How to improve gender equality in the workplace: actions for employers. ↩

3. The Behavioural Insights Team (2025). How to improve gender equality in the workplace: actions for employers. ↩

4. Erkal N, Gangadharan L, and Xiao E (2021). Leadership selection: Can changing the default break the glass ceiling? The Leadership Quarterly. ↩