General Insurance Spring Conference 2024: Aspiration versus achievement – board diversity statements and gender pay disparities in the UK insurance sector

Fri 03 May 2024 -
09:30 - 10:30

Since 2017, the UK government requires all employers with more than 250 staff members to disclose their gender pay gap in a systematic format. Many employers under the 250 staff threshold also choose to report it, with results being freely available.

Part 1 of the presentation:

• uses all the UK gender pay gap data (going back to 2017) on a curated data set of 130+ UK insurance entities to highlight the changing nature of the pay gap
• covers the share of women in the top quartile of earnings, the differences between larger and smaller insurers, insurers, and brokers, and a host of other data

Part 2 analyses every available board diversity policy for UK Government Investments authorised entities (both personal and commercial lines, and the Lloyds market). It aims to cover several themes. These include various diversity targets set, their aims (such as gender diversity, ethnic diversity, mixture), and other salient points. It looks at the use of ‘tie-breaker’ criteria, when 2 candidates seem to have similar skills, and whether it favours certain groups over others.

The presentation finishes with a quantitative description of what firms end up with, at least as far as gender diversity is concerned. It uses both:

• anonymised openly available data from the Prudential Regulation Authority register
• results of the speaker’s private freedom of information requests to the Bank of England

Featured Speakers

Michael Stefan

As a Partner at Hanover, Michael specialises in leadership search within the insurance ecosystem, particularly actuarial and analytics. A mathematical economics graduate of York University, Michael also produces Hanover’s research into salaries. He has also advised Lloyds and other P&C insurers on their compensation strategies.

Michael has 20 years’ experience of recruiting actuaries, primarily in the UK. He has also been involved in recruiting in several international financial hubs including Paris, Madrid, Sao Paulo, and Brussels.