Driving diversity: data, hiring changes and selling the industry

This much is clear: the re/insurance industry wants to be better at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Companies are spending time and money on initiatives, but progress is slow.

According to Kael Coleman, founder and chief executive officer of Protecdiv, while the industry has made efforts, the outcomes so far have been pretty limited.

“We haven’t seen a lot of the change that many would have hoped we would have seen by now,” he added, speaking at an Intelligent Insurer panel on race and ethnicity in the re/insurance industry. He believes that the industry has not yet been forced to figure out how to push DEI, but that metrics for the industry would be impactful.

“Having a DEI officer isn’t enough—we should be able to measure the outcomes over reasonable periods of time,” said Coleman. “For us to make that next step to go from the starting point to something that’s more impactful, we do have to have metrics that we hold ourselves to.”

For companies, Natasha Scotland Courcy, senior vice president, general counsel and chief operating officer of Athene Bermuda and vice chair of Bermuda International Long Term Insurers and Reinsurers (BILTIR), said: “What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done.

“Having a plan and understanding where your organisation sits is critical. We also have to challenge how we recruit, how we retain and how we progress our diverse talent in organisations a bit more.”

She added that companies need to be measuring their success based on goals and targets.

Recruitment opportunities

While Margaret Spence, chief executive officer and founder of the Inclusion Learning Lab, agreed that data can be beneficial, she added that certain aspects of the DEI journey cannot be dealt with by data.

“It’s the managers and supervisors, the people who are managing us day to day who are not seeing our potential, who are stymieing our growth, and stopping us moving ahead,” she warned.

Sima Ruparelia, chief actuarial and risk officer at PartnerRe, non-executive director at British Gas and chair of the Insurance Supper Club Racial Justice Working Group, added that while people do want to see diversity throughout an organisation, as part of this, people must accept that not everyone is going to be the same.

“There is a tendency, when you’re developing people, to try to mould them into the same people you’ve already got at the top of the organisation, and I don’t think that helps. We have different styles and ways of working—we have to be much more open to those things,” she said.

According to Ruparelia, people need to see the “flight path” for their careers when they join a company and any training programmes in place need to take into account differences, rather than trying to mould people into something “like the white man at the top of the organisation because that’s what they class as success”.

Going back to the beginning of careers, it’s crucial for companies to work on their hiring and progression processes.

“Companies should be challenging where they source their candidates from. You can’t go to the same recruitment fairs and expect to get the same results—you need to be intentional about recruitment opportunities,” said Scotland Courcy.

Many companies in the industry are now beginning to use blind recruiting, which removes the candidate’s name and any other identifying factors from applications.

Scotland Courcy added: “We want to get rid, as much as we can, of unconscious bias. What can we do to minimise that unconscious bias at the inception so we can get a more diverse pool of talent?”

Spence noted that even where information is removed from a resume, people can then be eliminated after a video interview. However, data can help here.

“You have to look at which managers eliminated them, what’s the trend with that manager, what’s their comfort level,” she said. Speaking of her company, Spence added: “We dive into data and pinpoint it down to managers who will never hire someone, but that manager is the highest revenue generator for the company so no-one will challenge them.”

Selling the industry

Going back even further than recruitment, the panellists discussed how re/insurance sells itself to ensure that there’s career awareness in schools and colleges.

“We don’t sell the industry at all,” said Coleman. “There’s a handful of schools we recruit from and a handful of networks whereby people come into the industry but by and large we don’t even go to top schools in the country.”

Ruparelia agreed that re/insurance is not selling itself, but that it’s a “fantastic industry to be in so there’s a lot to sell in this industry”.

She added that targets do work, explaining that the UK government had set a target for at least a third of female board members at listed companies by the end of 2020. This has been achieved.

Scotland Courcy discussed the fact that BILTIR goes into schools in Bermuda to talk about the insurance industry and the space available, but “more importantly we put our money where our mouth is” with scholarships to help students enter the industry.

But, she cautioned, despite this, children growing up on Bermuda do not see themselves reflected in the senior levels of organisations.

“Bermudans who enter re/insurance organisations sometimes feel like the ‘other’, in a place that’s their home. They feel they have to work that much harder, and any mistake is a reason to get fired,” she said.

These perceptions, thoughts and insecurities are very pervasive, said Scotland Courcy, adding that there needs to be proper acknowledgment of this.

Spence concluded: “When I come into an organisation and I do not see myself in a leadership role, I learn very quickly that my voice will not matter, that my desires will not be appreciated, that my growth will be not be targeted.

“That’s one of the reason why young people aren’t staying in this industry. We have to do better if we want to maintain minority and diverse talent.”