Insurance, finance firms with the most women executives

With its ad hoc suit-and-tie uniform, the insurance and financial services world has not long been a place where women were encouraged to shatter glass ceilings. Consider the experience Progressive CEO Tricia Griffith had once while attending a business conference with her husband. "Everyone assumed because the majority of CEOs are male that (my husband) was a CEO," Griffith told S&P Global Market Intelligence as part of its Diversity in Insurance series. "That was more of an obvious unconscious bias on their part versus people not respecting me." Diversity conversations and initiatives became more prominent in 2020 alongside the reenergized social justice movement sparked by the death of George Floyd and others at the hands of police officers. But there is a myriad of reasons to foster diverse leadership besides societal pressure or the simple fact that it's the right thing to do. BBVA reported recently that a diverse and inclusive workforce also:

• Increases productivity;
• Attracts top-performing job candidates;
• Encourages innovation; and
• Increases sales.

In short, diversity is good for a company's bottom line. As part of its series published earlier in 2020, S&P analyzed insurance and financial services companies to determine what percentage of their ranks are comprised of female executives and officials. The slideshow above illustrates a dozen companies where there are enough women leaders for the organization to rank above the industry median of 22.9%. Companies below that median for female executives and officers included Berkshire Hathaway, UnitedHealth Group, Genworth Financial, Chubb and Athene. Keep reading…

• 'Professional loneliness': A woman disrupting the insurance sector
• Women in insurance aren't going anywhere but the top
• 'The streets have spoken.' How will insurance respond?