Diverse recruitment panels, focusing on personal and leadership development and championing senior female role models are just some of the ways insurance sector signatories to the Women in Finance charter are seeking to achieve gender equality in senior positions.
However despite these measures, earlier this week the Women in Finance Taskforce warned it would take 30 years to achieve gender equality in senior positions and published a series of significant recommendations to tackle the problem and speed up equality.
These included diverse shortlists for senior positions with 50% female representation, removing male biased recruitment ads, and detailed diversity targets.
Health & Protection contacted a number of insurers who are signatories to the Women in Finance charter to find out what actions they are taking to make gender equality in senior roles across insurance a reality.
The charter commits signatories to:
- supporting the progression of women into senior roles in the financial services sector by focusing on the executive pipeline and the mid-tier level;
- recognising the diversity of the sector and that firms will have different starting points – each firm should therefore set its own targets and implement the right strategy for their organisation;
- publicly reporting on progress to deliver against these internal targets to support the transparency and accountability needed to drive change.
Diverse interview panels and equal benefits
Aviva, whose CEO Amanda Blanc is Women in Finance champion, revealed it has introduced a number of measures including balanced shortlists, recruitment training to reduce hiring bias and diverse recruitment panels.
It is also using psychometric testing, ensuring all roles advertised are flexible and part time, that flexible working is available to all staff and has removed location specific roles. A women’s sponsorship programme has been introduced to accelerate the pipeline of women into senior roles.
Aviva offers equal parental leave, gives employees an entitlement of 35 hours paid carers leave a year, has partnered with menopause specialist Peppy, operates a zero tolerance harassment policy, a reverse mentoring programme and champions senior female role models.
Steve Collinson, chief HR officer at Zurich UK, told Health & Protection the insurer operates a part time jobs initiative which has enabled the firm to double part time hires since 2019.
It also introduced diverse interview panels, has reworded job adverts to contain gender neutral language, equalised maternity and paternity pay and offers support for women going through menopause or IVF treatment.
Aegon UK said while it has achieved its commitment to hit 33% female representation in its CEO-2 population by the end of 2021, it is committed to equity and improving gender diversity at all levels across the organisation.
To help increase gender balance and representation it has increased shared parental pay and is investing in personal and leadership development at all levels of the organisation to create a pipeline of female leaders, while senior leaders have participated in inclusive leadership and unconscious bias training.
60% female appointments
Vitality has set and met a target of 60% female appointments to senior levels, adapted succession planning to develop a female talent pipeline, changed recruitment and selection practices to source more talented women, including promoting flexible working options and ensured job adverts use gender neutral language.
It has introduced a Women’s Forum to advise on gender issues and signed up to the Chartered Insurance Institute’s Insuring Women’s Futures campaign.
For parents it has enhanced and equalised parental leave entitlements, signed up to the Association of British Insurers transparent parental leave and pay initiative and introduced child-minding and menopause support benefits for employees.
Touching on training and development, Vitality has piloted Lean-In circles, where small groups of peers come together to support one another and learn new skills, launched a leadership development programme for women in management positions, rolled out unconscious bias training to all managers, and included a module on diversity and inclusion in annual compulsory training for all employees.
It has also published its commitment to diversity and inclusion on the firm’s careers site.
Allianz revising recruitment and parental leave
Jonathan Moyse, HR director at Allianz, said the insurer is in the process of revising its parental leave policies as well as recruitment techniques. As an example, in 2021 all its adverts for IT, data and information security jobs were put through a gender decoder.
The insurer already operates leadership programmes promoting gender equality and gender balanced succession planning for its executive positions, and has special returner, apprenticeship, internship and graduate programmes.
Moyse said Allianz enables learning and development to ensure all employees are encouraged and supported to move forward with their careers including formal qualifications as well as mentoring, buddy schemes and secondments.
Allianz also has employee networks which focus on a range of topics including the firm’s working parents network and its gender equality network, who work with the business to raise awareness and drive meaningful change.
Tracey Kneller, group chief people officer at Royal London, revealed at the start of last year the mutual increased its target for the number of women in senior roles to 42% by 2025. At 31 December 2021, it had 36% of women in senior roles.
Kneller added the mutual also offers flexibility in all roles, has gender balanced shortlists, uses competency based interviews, has removed male bias from job adverts and introduced initiatives such as its Career Confidence and Inclusion Mentoring programmes to support women with internal opportunities.
‘Accountability, targets and transparency are critical to success’
Tracy Garrad, chief executive officer at Axa Health, said the firm’s efforts towards greater gender equality at more senior levels of the business were beginning to reap rewards, with 39% of senior management being female compared to 29% at the end of 2020.
In addition, 41% of executive roles are held by women which is up 9.3% since 2020.
As part of its inclusive recruitment action plan, Axa Health said it ensures job adverts have a reasonable balance of male and female gendered words and that it requests gender balanced shortlists for all executive roles, which will also be rolled out to senior leader roles.
It has launched inclusive recruitment training and toolkits for managers and interviewers.
Garrad added the firm has an employee network promoting gender equality and the needs of working parents and carers and offers flexible working policies.
It has also introduced a new menopause policy and runs speaker events to raise awareness of menopause and support available.
In terms of learning and development, the firm runs programmes designed to support female talent and holds line managers accountable for progress on gender equality through performance related goals.
“We believe that accountability via targets, and transparency in reporting progress against them, have been critical success factors in the progress we’ve made so far,” Garrad added.
“The report includes recommendations that we’re already implementing and are showing success in doing so, but we’re aware that we and the industry have so much more to do to accelerate the pace of change.
“We’re committed to helping create a more gender balanced financial services sector as a whole. To do that we must all be bolder to create meaningful change.
“I’ve been pleased to contribute to the development of the latest blueprint for action, as part of the accountable executive taskforce, and I’m confident the adoption and embedding of these actions will accelerate the journey.”