Big table, few seats

Aniqah Majid asks why, even now, there are so few women in positions of influence in the insurance industry

Though it fairs better than most industries in the race for gender equality, insurance has a long way to go before it reaches any sort of finishing line.

Women make up a sizeable chunk of the industry, yet its reputation for inclusiveness is less convincing the further you look up the organisation. Be it due to pay disparity, unsuitable work environments, or cultures that fail to incentivise female talent, women are thin on the ground when it comes to positions of influence in both incumbents and insurtechs.

According to data from Statista, full- and part-time working women averaged around 45 per cent of the overall UK insurance workforce in 2021, the sample coming from the HMRC Pay As You Earn records.

In the US, women dominate the industry. A 2018 report from Million Women Mentors, Women In Insurance: Leading To Action, showed they accounted for around 60 per cent of the workforce every year since 2007. This number consists of insurance claims and policy clerks (86 per cent), underwriters (62.5 per cent) and claims adjusters, appraisers and investigators (62.2 per cent). Compared its progressive attributes when it comes to women’s representation in the general to diversity, insurtech has the same issues US labour market (46.8 per cent), the as the mainstream insurance market,” figures look healthy. But have to search observes Joanne Butler, head of product hard to find women in leadership roles. marketing and pre-sales at Charles Taylor,

Globally, women made up 23 per cent of a UK insurtech providing claims solutions C-suite executives, 10 per cent of CEOs and and technology to the global insurance just eight per cent of board members in the market. “A cursory look at many of the re/insurance industry in 2021, according leading insurtech players indicates many to SwissRe study Gender Diversity In The of the senior positions are held by men.” Re/insurance Industry: For A Sustainable Even now, the succession of a woman Future. Data released a year earlier by CEO or board member is heralded as an the London Market Group (LMG), which industry first, instead of standard practice. looked into the balance of men and women This August, the century-old protection in London’s specialist insurance and and indemnity (P&I) insurer, American reinsurance sector, showed that 29 per cent P&I Club, will welcome its first female CEO. of re/insurers had no women in what the Dorothea Ioannou, who moves up from country’s Financial Conduct her previous position of Authority calls ‘controlled deputy COO. While a great functions’, the most senior personal achievement jobs in the industry. At for Ioannou, even she the time, LMG’s chairman, acknowledges that her Matthew Moore, called progress to the top is the findings ‘disappointing’ a phenomenon. and pointed to a waste of On her appointment, female talent, saying it was Ioannou said: “I am thrilled ‘inadequate to the needs and excited with this of our industry going new appointment, which, forward’. He also said the as a woman, carries with London Market Group it not only responsibility was ‘energetically and and significance for our transparently seeking to organisation but also, remedy the gender gaps’. as a first in the P&I sector,

“There has been a lot of for the marine insurance talk about the fact that, for all industry in general.”

There has been a lot of talk about the fact that, for all its progressive attributes when it comes to diversity, insurtech has the same issues as the mainstream insurance market

Joanne Butler, Charles Taylor

So, why are women being made to etch on the glass ceiling for a seat at the table, especially given there’s plenty of evidence to suggest their presence in the corridors of power has a direct impact on the bottom line? That earlier SwissRe report found that re/insurers with a higher proportion of women in C-suite and board positions outperform others by three-to-four points in terms of return on equity (ROE), and it’s by no means the only study to find a correlation between gender diversity and business performance.

There are several theories as to why having women at the top contributes enhanced financial success, but could it be because they tend to create a more positive and, therefore, more productive culture all the way down the organisation? McKinsey found in its 2021 annual Women In The Workplace report, for example, that employees felt female managers supported them the most, emotionally and professionally, during the pandemic. insurer Sheila’s Wheels was founded on the back of research that discovered women have different needs to men when it comes to cover, particularly around possessions they carry in the car with them. On the flip side, men pay 26 per cent more for their insurance than women, according to research from MoneySuperMarket, due to factors such as occupation and their tendency to buy more expensive motors.

The difference in behaviour and attitude goes to show that, when it comes to insurance of all types, women want different things – in some regions, even down to who introduces them to the policy. A 2020 study carried out in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the World Bank, The Role of Gender In Agent

Battling to break through

In the retail insurance market, where female buyer numbers are growing exponentially, women’s absence from leadership Diversity positions is even more of brings in a puzzle, given that they instinctively connect with at least half of customers. different viewpoints, and thus different

By 2030, female ways of solving policyholders will earn the insurance industry $1.7trillion, the majority problems – whether it is sales, claims, of that growth coming analytics, product from the life and health sectors, according to the International Finance Corporation. It surveyed or regulation Renu Ann Joseph, Luminant Analytics women across the world for its She For Shield: Insure Women To Better Protect All report and found that, as their income increased, so too did their desire to protect what they had through insurance. According to the report, women want options and variety, whether they have a family or not. Transparency with their insurers is a priority, and they are more loyal to insurers who understand what they need.

Insurance catering for women is not a new concept. Scottish Widows was set up in 1815 to take care of women and children who lost their fathers, brothers and husbands in the Napoleonic Wars. More recently, online car Banking, found that women were more likely to adopt digital financial services if introduced to them by a female agent. Renu Ann Joseph, founder and CEO of data analytics insurtech, Luminant Analytics, firmly believes that diversity brings in different viewpoints and, thus, different ways of solving problems – be it in sales, claims, analytics, product or regulation.

“Old ways will not open new doors,” she says. “Insurance needs to be able to open new doors to stand up to competition against tech companies and to attract talent. Diversity is a big driver of that openness.”

A former analyst and VP for SwissRe, Joseph is currently also head of Virtido’s Centre for Data Science and AI. Industry is aware of the lack of diversity and is actively moving to combat it, she says. A good place to start, then, might be addressing the gender pay gap.

According to Joseph: “Looking at the statistics for company performance, we find that [all] companies with female founders perform 63 per cent better than those of their male peers. Performance being of key interest to potential investors, it remains a bit of a mystery as to why there is still such a male pattern to investments.”

She points to three startup insurtechs that were acquired or placed into run-off in 2020 – Brolly, founded by Phoebe Hugh, Coverly, started by Jodi Cartwright, and Buzzvault, led by Becky Downing. Would they have attracted investment to continue longer had they been run by men?

In March this year, the Million Women Mentors Women In Insurance Initiative (WII) announced that it will be conducting its second data collection effort, calling on insurance companies to offer up their information on employee demographics, accounting for gender as well as race. Its previous exercise revealed groundbreaking insights, from pay gaps to employee loyalty. It will be interesting to see what progress – if any – has been made in four years.

Findings from the Chartered Insurance Institute, in 2018, showed that the pay gap across 199 insurers, brokers, financial and other insurance-related firms was around 24 per cent – double the national 12 per cent median across all industries. Three years later, Statista put the mean gender pay gap of full-time employees in the financial and insurance sector in the UK even higher, at around 26.5 per cent.

There’s no reason, of course, why women couldn’t help correct that by founding their own insurtechs. But, according to Crunchbase, there are still only 162 of those, which raised a total of $2.6billion in funding rounds to March 2022. And that’s out of 655 insurtechs whose funding rounds captured a total of $16.2billion.

A long way to parity:

Women make up just eight per cent of board members in re/insurance globally, says SwissRe