Australia is known for supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in its culture and among its citizens. However, even though many Australian organisations and companies advocate women’s equality, insurance pioneer Sam White (pictured above) calls for “bringing more feminine energy” to the Australian insurance industry.
White is the CEO of Stella Insurance and is regarded as an industry pioneer in the UK and Australia. She was a keynote speaker at Sydney’s recent InsurtechLIVE 23 conference, where she was introduced as an industry “rockstar” and an “unapologetic advocate for increasing the presence of women.”
In an interview with Insurance Business Australia TV (IBTV), White emphasised the significance of “feminine energy” and her calls for removing gender bias from the insurance industry.
“[Based on] my personal observation and [because] I’ve been in insurance for 20 odd years and I am female, I’m going to have a biased perspective on this, but I look at the financial services industry and see a lot of what I would call ‘left brain thinking’,” she said. “If you think about masculine and feminine energy, plenty of men have [a lot] of feminine energy, and plenty of women have [a lot] of masculine energy. If you attribute it to the brain, [the] left brain is analytical, process-driven, [and] KPI-focused, [while the] right brain is more creative, collaborative, empathetic, [and] much more the sort of human side. I think we have really focused our product design, thinking, [and] engagement with customers on all those left-brain attributes.”
Even though insurance products are for everybody, White noted her company designed products “from a female perspective.”
“If you go back to that sort of feminine side, you know, your numbers have to be right in insurance,” she explained. “So, we make sure that we are building products that provide good loss ratios and tick all the boxes from an industry viewpoint. But the more important thing from our perspective is how do we engage with customers? How do we connect with them? And Stella is a community platform at its heart. So, if you go on to Stella, you’ll get a feel for something very different than an insurance business. We partner with people like Women and Girls Emergency Center, and we give $5 from every policy to that cause.
“I think we’ve been doing that for months now. As soon as we got up and running, [it was our] goal to get to this kind of giveback position, and we’ve given probably over $70,000 now and did a conference in Sydney to help support female entrepreneurs launch their businesses. The products themselves have some nuances where we’ve changed underwriting factors that we think are particularly prohibitive to women, and there’s a lot more product development that is going into that at the moment in terms of understanding where a clause may not drive equality.”
Learn more about how Stella Insurance embraces the “feminine energy” by watching the IBTV episode “Insurance pioneer on Aussie and global challenges.” You may find the insurance companies with the best DEI programs for 2022 by reading the IB 5-Star Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 2022 report.
