Closing the gap: Tackling gender diversity in the insurance industry

The past few weeks have been incredibly important for AXA and our work on gender parity. We published our Gender Pay Report at the beginning of the month and I gave evidence to the Treasury Select Committee as part of their Women in Finance inquiry earlier this week.

Being transparent and talking about gender diversity openly is the easy part – now we need to roll our sleeves up and tackle the real work – closing the gap.

Our Gender Pay Gap report revealed that our median pay gap at is 17%, slightly better than the national average of 18.4%. However, there is no cause for celebration, as our group HR director Lucinda Charles-Jones says in the report – it’s just not good enough.

The problem for us, and I suspect a lot of other companies in a similar position, isn’t men and women in the same roles - staff in our company doing the same jobs receive the same salary. So what causes the gap? In short, we don’t have all the answers so we need to do some serious research to get to the root of the issue.

One of the problems is the lack of women in senior positions. Currently at AXA around 30% of senior positions are held by women. We are signatories of the Women in Finance Charter and have pledged to increase the number to 40% by 2020. It won’t mean that our job is done but it would represent solid progress.

The gap is something we desperately need to, and must, address. I have spoken about this candidly in my recent interview with Insurance Business and when I told the Treasury Select Committee that we need to stop talking about it and actually do something about it.

So, what are we doing at AXA to try to close the gap? For starters –

·       We’re creating a Leadership Development Programme to support our future senior employees, where promising staff will work closely with our executive team and qualified coaches to learn how to lead.

·       We’re taking part in the 30% Club - a cross-company, cross-sector mentoring scheme giving our female staff the opportunity to learn from leaders outside of the insurance sector.

·       We’re creating gender balanced shortlists, for the areas of our business where we have traditionally had a lack of female staff.

·       We’re also working on an unconscious bias training programme that will help us understand why women are under-represented in senior roles.

In addition, employees with caring responsibilities– including call centre staff - can already take advantage of flexible working and through our WoMen Employee Research Group we encourage potential female leaders to speak out about the barriers they may face working at AXA.

We know that it won’t happen overnight but we are fully committed to creating true equality at AXA. The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report tells us that gender parity is over 200 years away but let’s not wait two centuries for meaningful change.

If we work hard and act swiftly we have a real chance at making a difference much sooner than 2218.