CEOs and CUOs

Address the underlying cultural issue

• Understand the lived experience of female underwriters in your company – their 5 to 9 shift; their experience of your entertainment events; their experience of comments and benevolent bias in your organisation.
• Call out the inappropriate comments when you hear them.
• Discourage those short-notice team drinks.
• Check the guest list of your entertainment events: if there’s never more than one or two women there, change the type of the event.

Diversify your underwriting leadership

• Who are the female underwriter role models in your organisation? If you don’t have any, go out and hire them.
• If there’s only one female, check in with her. She might be exhausted from carrying the burden of trying to single-handedly represent the voice of every female underwriter in your organisation.
• What is your 0-2 year and 2–5-year pipeline for female underwriters? Is it better than the 15% average? Is this a talent league table that you can and want to be top of?
• Don’t forget the ethnically diverse viewpoint. Today, the combined male and female figure is about 7%, versus 46% ethnic diversity in London (2021 census). 

Encourage sponsorship

• Sponsorship means speaking up for them at promotions, introducing them to new networks, getting them opportunities to speak at big events (internal and external), bringing them into important strategic conversations, getting them involved in the overall Syndicate Business Forecast process.
• Offer executive coaching.

Review succession planning and promotions

• One leading managing agent spoke about how they promote twice as many people as they hire. Examine your promotion processes and have someone in the room who challenges the decisions made to ensure they are fair.
• Promote for outcomes, not presenteeism, ‘executive presence’ or who hosts the most popular broker events.
• Look at your 3–5-year pipeline and think about how you can build it. Let’s not exacerbate the problem into the future.

Revisit parental leave policies

• Benchmark yourself against your peers and be ready to uplift that policy to give equal rights for men.
• At a minimum, introduce 12 weeks of paternity leave fully paid and 6 months of maternity leave (best practice being both fully paid for 6 months). 
• Make both a day one of employment right.
• Shout loudly about those men who take the full paternity leave – make them role models, particularly on your ExCo. 
• If a male member of your ExCo is about to become a father, strongly encourage him to take the full paternity leave and set an example for other men in the organisation.  
• Look at financial support measures you can take to support those with caring responsibilities, such as like paying for X days emergency childcare or elder care, or subsidised deals with national childcare chains.
• Explore whether your organisation would participate in or advocate for a returner initiative. Commit to hiring from the programme once participants complete it.

Shift the conversation on flexible working

• 75% of women in our survey said flexible working arrangements have been pivotal in supporting them.
• Judge by outcomes, not presenteeism – set women an objective but let them choose how they deliver it (e.g. new business target or team training).
• Flexible working can take many forms over someone’s career – don’t be rigid in what it means. Instead, talk to the individuals about what could work for them.
• Challenge the norms on travel and entertainment – one week per month to either the US or Asia is enough. Two nights of entertaining per week is enough. Finishing dinners by 8pm needs to become the norm. Set this standard yourself and role model this example.

Build a community

• Work to build community amongst the female underwriters in your company and join up with other companies.
• 22 Bishopsgate, for example, brought together senior women in Hiscox, Beazley and Canopius to facilitate their network.