Gender inclusion

We are committed to working with our members to achieve gender parity within the insurance and long-term savings industry. Currently our sector has great gender balance on entry-level equivalent roles. However, we have a long way to go to achieve parity at more senior levels. According to our 2022 DEI data collection, representation of women on executive teams is at 29%.

We expect to see more progress as firms adopt the practical steps we recommend, so that more women can advance into executive and board roles.

We have been encouraging our members to sign up for the Government’s Women in Finance charter since the charter was launched in 2016. We facilitate conversations between the charter and member firms in our DEI Network to ensure we remain committed to improving gender parity in our sector.

Attract

Become a signatory of our Making Flexible Work Campaign and Charter.
Become a signatory of our Transparent Parental Leave and Pay Initiative.
Create opportunities for employees from all backgrounds to act as ambassadors for the industry to potential recruits.
Review the inclusivity of communications (such as job adverts), removing phrases and imagery that are only relevant to some groups (such as ‘masculine’ words and other gendered language).
Create a dedicated hiring process for career returners.
When recruiting, consider longer hiring timelines to allow more candidates to apply (such as those with family or caring commitments).

Grow

Consider signing the Women in Finance Charter, a government initiative which commits firms to setting, measuring and reporting against targets to improve the number of women in senior roles.
Read our report 'Tackling the Gender Seniority Gap: What works for the insurance and long-term savings industry ’ for further recommendations.
Commit to opening up existing roles to flexible working (including job sharing and part-time working). Read more about job sharing below.
Pro-actively plan for a structured pipeline of opportunities for secondments and mid-career apprenticeships (such as when filling parental leave and other career-breaks/sabbaticals offered to colleagues) to offer opportunities to people who may not automatically apply for a permanent promotion.

Advance

Aim to publish Gender Pay Gap information annually even if out of formal scope for any legislative or regulatory disclosure requirements.
Review and update targets on gender across organisational levels.
Aim to collect and be able to analyse more granular data on representation to understand how intersectionality impacts the individual experiences of employees in your organization. As part of our sponsorship with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Women & Work, ABI contributed for the 2019 report, Inclusivity and Intersectionality Toolkit.

Job sharing

Job sharing is still a little known and underused form of flexible working in insurance and long-term savings. It allows employees who need or want to work part-time to continue progressing in their career – the same way as a full-time worker. People job share for different reasons and it has the potential to increase diversity by unlocking career opportunities for a wide variety of individuals.  For these reasons, increasing flexible working, particularly job sharing, can help employers attract and retain the best and most diverse talent and, over time, it will reduce the gender seniority gap.