Women Looking Up

For women and men alike, but particularly for women, it’s disheartening to see little has changed in the demographic make-up of the executive level of the Canadian property and casualty industry over the past decade. Women held only 23% of senior management roles in the industry in 2006, up a mere 1% since 1996. But waiting in the ranks, just below the senior management roles, at the management and middle management levels, the split in the gender divide is 50-50.

As the majority of aging chief executives contemplate retirement over the coming decade (one in five of the industry’s senior executives are in the “exit cohort” between the ages of 55 and 64), the question remains whether women in the management roles below them will be able to — or want to — shatter the traditional representational imbalance within the industry and edge into senior executive positions.

Many hope this will be the case. Certainly, the 50-50 split at the middle management level is an encouraging sign that women are well-positioned to make the move. Others find encouragement in the fact that there is an increasing share of women in the core business units of the industry (i. e. adjusters, claims representatives, appraisers, and brokers), areas in which women have traditionally been in the minority.

Optimists believe this is an indication of women breaking out of the clerical and customer service mold, a trend that will hopefully trickle up the chain of command. However, pessimists maintain that even though women in the property and casualty industry are increasingly participating in the core business units, the dual demands of their professional lives and home lives — often involving the primary care of elderly parents or children — may derail any ambition to become a senior executive. It remains to be seen whether acontemporary cultural shift in the division of labour in the household will be enough for women to break through the “glass ceiling” on the path to senior executive-level positions.

THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS

The Insurance Institute of Canada released A Demographic Analysis of the Property and Casualty Insurance Industry in Canada 2007-2017 in May 2008.

Richard Loreto of R. A. L. Consulting undertook the study, which was specifically related to the Canadian property and casualty industry. Commissioned by the institute, Loreto’s team collected demographic data from 43 (re)insurance companies, adjusting firms and brokerage firms, as well as four insurance councils and regulators, over the summer and fall of 2007. Nearly 91,000 records were submitted, representing 28,300 records of active employers within organizations, 12,500 terminated records and 50,000 records from the regulatory bodies across the country. Loreto then compared this data to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey and the 2001 Census.

Loreto found men held 78% of the industry’s senior management positions in 1996 and, 10 years later, that number remained relatively unchanged at 77%. But during the same period, women increasingly began to participate in other areas of the industry. For example, women represented only 49% of the claims adjusters and examiners in 1996, but that level of representation shot up to 70% a decade later. Similarly, but on a more modest scale, 49% of agents and brokers were women in 1996, whereas that number bumped up to 54% in 2006.Twenty-four per cent of the industry’s assessors, valuators and appraisers were women in 1996; this number increased to 31% by 2006.

As this happened, roles traditionally viewed as female-occupied bastions showed signs of diversification. Men, for example, increasingly performed customer service, information and related clerks’s tasks (24% of such occupations were held by men in 1996; 34% in 2006). Also, the percentage of male underwriters ticked upward by a percentage point over the past decade (as of 2006, men represented 29% of underwriters).

What do these numbers mean for women in the insurance industry? Canadian Underwriter approached a number of women, representing many different stages of a typical industry career, to check into the current status of what was once assumed to be an ‘Old Boys’ Club.’ Contrary to the myth, however, many women talked of a wealth of opportunities to move up in an organization — even if those career paths often ended up just short of the corner offices reserved for chief executives.

OPPORTUNITIES KNOCK

One interesting feature of the stories one hears from women in the industry is the relative ease of crossing over from one business unit to another. Gloria Haydock, a manager at The Economical’s Atlantic Region’s Customer Contact Centre, began her career 23 years ago as a file clerk. Bored out of her mind, she jokes that she was probably more assertive as a young woman fresh out of school than most in her cohort. “I knew I wouldn’t be in that position for very long, but I could see that there were a lot of opportunities in the industry,” she said. “So I went into my manager’s office and told him that he had to transfer me.”Within her first year, Haydock rose through her company’s ranks and was promoted from filing clerk to adjuster.

Twenty years ago, when Belynda Kerelchuk (now a vice president with Aon Re Canada in Toronto) first began her career in the industry, the majority of women working in the business held clerical positions. “But there were some in senior positions, and that was probably one of the reasons why I stayed,” she says. Before joining Aon Re, Kerelchuk worked in a firm with only one fellow female commercial underwriter. “The rest were all guys,” she says. “It was a total old boys’ club and they weren’t very welcoming.” A handful of senior managers strived to change the situation, by making a concerted effort to diversify the work place and encourage existing employees to keep pushing forward. “They really encouraged me to take courses,” she recalls. “They kept telling me they valued what I was doing and encouraged me to apply for different positions.”

The courses individual companies or industry associations offer provide “an opportunity to see the different angles of the business,” says 18-year-veteran Maria Pagliaro, an accident benefits team leader at Desjardins General Insurance. As did many others, Pagliaro accepted a job as a client service representative; she proceeded to take Institute courses that allowed her to narrow the focus of her career to her current position.

Peace Hills Insurance president and CEO Diane Brickner says the fact she is a woman has never hindered her from pursuing any opportunities in the industry — except once. She recalls applying for a marketing position early on in her career, when she was a commercial underwriter. The marketing position called for her to be alone on the road for a majority of her time. The branch manager — “a very senior gentleman, a wonderful person,” she says — took her aside and explained that he could not in good conscience give the position to a young woman, because she would be on her own all the time and he would worry constantly about her safety. “I didn’t walk out of his office offended at all,” Brickner says. “He was of a different generation and just couldn’t see putting me on the road.” A year later, after he retired, Brickner applied again for the job. This time she got the job — and despised it. “That’s been in my entire career the only time that I felt that I couldn’t go ahead or move forward because I was a female. And to tell you the truth, he was right: I hated that job,” she chuckles.

The road hasn’t always been so smooth for women. Louise Rivett, operations manager for Canada at Sedgwick CMS, has been an adjuster for nearly 30 years. She opened her own independent firm in Ontario in 1981 and was one of three female proprietors at the time. Rivett started her business in February and struggled with her “mostly-male” client base, which initially wanted verification that men worked for her before they would give her the ir business. She hired an experienced man in April “to whom I jokingly referred to as my Dad,” she says. Lo and behold, her business started to boom. “There was definitely a different perception as to how the industry looked at women versus men and their qualifications and expectations,” Rivett says. “I just stopped looking at that and thinking about it and forged on. I never let it bother me at all. I never let it be an issue.”

Karen Barkley, president and CEO of ACE Canada, believes that as more women enter the field, the industry will continue to see a cultural shift. She notes when she first began her career with ACE’s predecessor company, a number of women occupied senior management roles in key areas of underwriting and claims. “To me, they were instrumental in my development,” Barkley recalls. “As trail-blazers, they had made my senior management ambition attainable. To this point, I believe those coming up behind me will receive greater and greater acceptance.” She doesn’t subscribe to the notion that the commercial property and casualty industry is the last bastion of the old boys’ club. “I and others like me are proof of its demise,” she says.

The fact that more women are occupying core business units is encouraging news to Kathy Bardswick, president and CEO of The Co-Operators. “If women are getting into the core business roles, as opposed to the more clerical roles, I’m hoping this shows more well-roundedness in women’s experience generally. When you look at what’s needed at the senior levels, we need people with a deep understanding of the business from a number of perspectives. That will position women well to assume the senior and executive roles in the future.”

SHATTERING THE CEILING

Having a well-rounded career experience will no doubt aid women in attaining the proverbial “brass ring” associated with senior executive positions. But some suggest it will take a concerted effort on the part of employers and industry in general to help facilitate women’s move into the so-called C-suites, a reference to chief executive level positions. Some suggest the traditional dual obligations of career and family responsibilities — which have historically weighed more heavily on the shoulders of women — might conspire to prevent women from reaching the final rung of the corporate ladder.

Is there a “glass ceiling” for women in the insurance industry? The Insurance Institute’s study shows 75% of the senior managers in the insurance industry are male. How does this compare to other industries? It turns out the property and casualty insurance industry in Canada is slightly ahead of general corporations when it comes to female representation at the board level. Catalyst, an organization tracking the progress of women in corporate Canada, analyzed the demographics of the “Financial Post 500” companies in 2007. In its findings, released in June 2008, Catalyst found women’s representation on corporate boards in Canada remains remarkably low. Women held 13% of board seats in the FP500, up only one percentage point since 2005. Slightly more than 40% of FP500 companies in Canada in 2007 had no women acting as board directors; less than one-third of companies had multiple women on their boards. By comparison, 21% of property and casualty insurance firms had women on their respective boards. ¹

This is still a long way off from the 50-50 split many would like to see. What happens to women when it comes to making that jump from middle management into executive-level management? Studies of women’s career trajectories in other professions provide us with a clue.

In May 2007, for example, the Law Society of Upper Canada released a study of the law profession’s demographics. Researchers noted that although women were graduating from law school in record numbers, few were actually making it to the level of partner. They suggested the stunted career trajectory for women had to do with finding the right balance between a professional and family life.

Bardswick admits the insurance industry, like the law profession, is still influenced by the belief that women must sacrifice their family lives in order to succeed in the C-suite. Historically, she suggests, the responsibilities of child-rearing and elderly parent care have rested more heavily on the shoulders of women than men. “And so, women are still facing some imbalance from that perspective; either out of necessity or just because they decide life is too short, they don’t want to be living under those kinds of pressure. They don’t want to take on the more senior levels at work that are more demanding.”

CULTURE SHIFTS AND FLEX MUSCLE

A documented cultural shift associated with raising families might help clear a path in the future for women to move from middle management to senior executive-level positions. Recent studies suggest that as women take up more non-traditional roles in the workplace, men appear to be taking on more responsibilities on the home front. This could play out in a way that frees up more time for women to succeed in the C-suite.

For example, an increasing number of men are taking advantage of paternity leave. Statistics Canada in June 2008 released its study on Father’s use of paid paternal leave. The report uses data from the 2006 Employment Insurance Coverage Survey to examine the use of paternity leave in and outside of Quebec (Quebec enhanced its parental leave program in 2006). Of those men eligible for the Quebec program, 56% claimed benefits in 2006, up from 32% in 2005. The participation rate for fathers outside of Quebec, 11%,remained steady over the three years that the study took into consideration.

For women, paternal leave confers important professional benefits. If women are no longer obliged to take a full year of maternity leave, they won’t have to leave the workforce for 12 months at a time in order to rear their children. Shared responsibilities for raising children helps break down a traditional barrier so often cited as a chief obstacle to women entering senior executive positions; that is, women do not have the time to be mothers and senior executives at one and the same time.

“Family roles are shifting, and you’re starting to see men participate more and more at home,” says Kelly MacDonald, vice president and manager of Aon Reed Stenhouse’s professional services group in Toronto. But, she adds, “there are still household and family demands that pull [women] away from the workplace.”

Referencing the law society study, Ellen Moore, president and CEO of Chubb Canada, notes differences between the nature of the legal profession and the insurance industry might create opportunities for insurers to better manage the special needs of a female employee juggling both sets of responsibilities.

“If I understand the law profession’s business model correctly, making partner is all about billable hours and the relationships you have with significant clients who are very demanding and hard to transfer to someone else and step away [from for long periods],” Moore observes. This in turn “may keep women lawyers from ascending the ladder.”

An insurer, on the other hand, can work with women on a broader basis, developing broader skill sets and other career opportunities that women can take advantage of whenever life throws them a personal challenge or choice, Moore continues. The work force is 50% female, she adds, and so if insurers fail to stay connected with that 50% in a way that works for both parties, then insurers stand to lose their competitive edge.

“It can be something as specific as handling a maternity leave,” Moore says. “If we don’t as an organization have a way to off-ramp and on-ramp the employee in such a way that they can continue to be a very important part of the development of our business, shame on us.”

Still, the thought of losing a full-time employee for a year can be quite frightening for an employee. Brickner stresses a balance must be maintained when staffing, because having five or six e mployees in a department off for one year can be “crippling to an organization.” Rivett agrees, noting she’s had to deal with staffing issues of her own. When the company had its first long-term mat leave, “we continued to reach out and talk to that colleague even though she’s on leave,” she says.

The office kept the employee involved in new developments, quarterly results and invited her in for special occasions, to meet new hires and for important meetings so that she doesn’t come back feeling like a stranger, Rivett says. “It takes a bit of effort to do that. But they’re still employees, even though they’re not here. A leave doesn’t mean that your employee is terminated.”

Pagliaro was actually promoted to a new position while out on maternity leave. Before leaving, she had a conversation with her manager in which she expressed her interest in a training position. While she was on leave, a posting for her desired job came up and a colleague called her to let her know. “I actually got that job while on mat leave, so that when I came back to work I was in a new position.”

The industry as a whole, as well as individual organizations, can take steps beyond just aiding an employee during her maternity leave. Some have, for example, formed professional development programs to help women achieve their career goals, be they entering the C-suite or becoming a heavy equipment adjuster.

Fifteen years ago, Moore was a founding member of Chubb’s corporate women’s development council, which has since grown to chapters around the world, including one in Canada. The council’s mandate is to provide special programming for skill development and career planning unique to women. A consortium program was created in conjunction with an American business school and the company sponsors 12 female employees a year to partake in the program, which covers everything from financial courses to softer skills unique to women. This year, the Canadian chapter hosted a meeting for all assistant vice presidents and above in Canada. The chapter invited an expert on personal branding to coach women in how to talk about their successes and promote themselves in the workplace.

ACE Canada launched a women’s forum this year as well, Barkley says. “It’s a global program… to ensure ACE maximizes its business opportunities by providing a culture that actively fosters career development for women.” One of the first Canadian initiatives, she adds, is the launch of a mentoring program.

Aviva Canada also runs a number of development programs, specifically targeting senior leaders and executives, regardless of gender, notes a company spokesperson. The focus of its Raleigh International program is leadership development and learning through experience — an equal number of men and women participate, the company adds. In a recent round of Aviva Canada’s executive hires, seven of the appointments were women compared to three males.

Donna Garcia, a senior commercial underwriter with ING Canada, notes her employer has recently implemented programs that are not necessarily specifically designed for women, but aid them in professional development and the balancing of the double-day duty. Through the “Development Plan” program, Garcia gets to both be a mentee and a mentor, allowing her to gain a sense of what’s required from a more advanced job; at the same time, she helps and manages others with less experience. “It really allows me to get a sense if this is something that I want, and to gain a sense of what’s involved while having someone to look up to,” she says.

Another recent workplace innovation, “flex hours,” allow people to adapt their work schedules to home life, thus making it easier to balance a busy professional life with a busy household. Noting this, Bardswick suggests employers in the industry should be creative in providing opportunities for their employees, either through work-sharing, mentoring, teleworking or flex time. She notes one of her colleagues has three children — one with high needs — and works “really weird hours, but she’s able to hold a senior role because we can build the support around it.”

Most importantly, employers need to have an open and honest dialogue with their employees, Bardswick stresses. “If any of us claim that we’re always in balance, I think we’re not being honest with ourselves,” she says. “It happens and you need to be able to talk about it and get yourself re-focused.”

ACHIEVING BALANCE

Looking ahead over the next 10 years, hope remains high the imbalance between men and women in the insurance industry’s senior levels will level off. That could be achieved through a natural evolution of women taking up more non-traditional roles that eventually trickle to the top. Or it might be the result of a concerted effort made by the industry’s employers and employees.

“Balance is a moment in time,” Moore says. “There is a road map that you need to have for yourself.”This means engaging an employer about what one is prepared to do at work, and also discussing career options with family members and loved ones to create the balance and support needed to succeed. “It doesn’t happen perfectly, there are always compromises,” Moore counsels. “But if you can be realistic about it, then you’ll have a better shot at it.”

1 When female representation in the insurance industry is compared to that of other financial service organizations, the comparison is more of a match: 21% of accounting firms, 20.9% of banks and 24.3% of credit unions have women represented at the board level.

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A well-rounded career experience will aid women in attaining senior-level positions. But some suggest employers and the industry in general will have to help facilitate women’s move into the C-suites.

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21% of Canada’s property and casualty insurance firms had women on their boards as of 2007.

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A cultural shift associated with raising families might help clear a path for women to move into senior executive-level positions