When Scary, Ginger and Sporty Spice famously admonished listeners, “tell me what you want, what you really, really want”, they weren’t necessarily addressing women in the insurance industry.
But Pamela Venu (pictured), chief operations officer at Coversure, thinks that all women should be asking themselves that very question about their working lives.
“Really ask yourself what you want, what is important to you? Don’t pretend to be someone that you’re not… because if you don’t have your heart and soul behind something, you’re not going to give it 110%,” Venu told Insurance Business.
Venu, who is taking part in a panel on career strategies at the Women in Insurance Summit 2024 in February, is speaking from experience. Before helping her husband Jason set up Coversure just over five years ago, she was feeling less engaged in her risk and compliance work at her old employer.
“I’ve been there. In my previous career of close to 20 years, [I realised] I’ve still got another 20 odd years of working life ahead of me… [and] I don’t know if I want to be in this job anymore,” she recalled.
Certain life stage issues had added pressure to her circumstances.
“I really struggled with the whole work/life balance with my children – I’ve got two young boys. I didn’t want to miss out and [Coversure] was an opportunity where I could have my cake and eat it too.”
She has never looked back.
Venu will be speaking at the upcoming Women in Insurance Summit 2024 in Auckland on February 27 – thanks to event sponsor Deloitte, gold sponsor Delta, and silver sponsor NIB. Book your tickets today.
Venu’s experience is a microcosm of wider change as the mainstreaming of flexible work models driven by the pandemic improved the landscape for women looking for more options around working styles.
Research by Grant Thornton International shows that the pandemic pushed diversity and inclusion to front-of-mind for many businesses, partly due to its impact on working women and the need to adopt practices that made it easier for them to work. It also proved a watershed for lifting more women into senior management globally as changes to the working environment boosted female career trajectories.
The Women in Business 2023 report found that in businesses, adopting a hybrid model, with a defined mix of onsite and remote working, there are higher levels (34%) of women in senior management. With completely flexible working, it’s even higher at 36%. Put simply: the greater the flexibility, the greater the levels of women in senior roles.
Conversely, primarily office-based businesses have a much lower level of women in senior management than businesses with flexible, hybrid and home-based models, at 29%.
Coversure, which provides advice on a range of insurance products including life, house, car and commercial, is playing its part by supporting the women on its team.
Venu said that one of the qualities that is key to a flourishing career in insurance is passion, and she seeks to maximise it among Coversure staff.
“We fully support our women with any ideas and initiatives that they are really passionate about,” she said. “Something we find is that if you’re passionate about something, you are going to do it really well.”
Senior female financial advisor Elle Wuthrich, for example, feels very strongly about improving financial literacy among New Zealanders and Coversure has backed her efforts to promote financial literacy at community outreach events.
Venu herself is a role model for finding passions in work.
“For me, for example, I love the regulatory and compliance space, I really love it. I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to that sort of stuff,” she admitted.
When compliance-related tasks arise at Coversure, she is always quick to raise her hand and dive into the nitty-gritty.
Venu sees encouraging passion as particularly important when it comes to recruiting younger staff, something she feels the industry needs to focus more on after the regulatory changes around licensing that were introduced in March this year.
Coversure, while a boutique firm with just 13 people, has more women than men and a strong multicultural balance. It has also broken in a number of people new to insurance as it anticipates a talent shortage in terms of adviser numbers stemming from the tougher career entry requirements.
“Our initiative is about being able to get new blood into the insurance industry, because… there’s going be a massive gap around financial advisors,” said Venu. It also aims to help diversify what has tended to be a very homogenous pool of people historically.
In New Zealand, data on female representation in the insurance industry alone is scarce. A 2020 paper in the Australian Journal of Management estimated the proportion of females in the broader category of authorised financial advisers in New Zealand at 23.5%. The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) estimated as of June 2021 that women made up around 28% of financial advisers, but both figures are much lower than the majority female participation seen in the legal profession or among Members of Parliament in the previous government, for example.
Even so, Venu said that there are more role models in insurance than there once were. She points to Naomi Ballentyne, co-founder and managing director of Partners Life as one. Others might be Amanda Whiting, chief executive of IAG New Zealand, or Melissa Cantell, chief executive at Aon New Zealand.
“Traditionally, the insurance world has always been seen as the old boys’ club and very male dominated. But this is starting to change,” said Venu.
Part of the legacy of this new generation of women leaders in insurance appears to be around giving the industry a more modern and interesting image. Insurance can sometimes conjure up images of dull offices and men in suits, but women are starting to help give the industry a makeover.
“It gets a bad rap. [But with] more role models, it’s seen as a career that doesn’t seem boring anymore,” she said.
It might not quite be the Spice Girls, but insurance in New Zealand is slowly becoming less grey, corporate, and male than it was.
“There is a really cool a shift in the amount of women in senior leadership positions in the financial industry now – there’s so many more than when I started even four, five years ago when there was hardly anybody,” said Venu.
“So, kudos to all those women who have paved the way for people like myself so that I can do this as well.”
Book your tickets today: Registration for the Women in Insurance Summit 2024 in Auckland is now open
