The Chartered Insurance Institute (
CII) has encouraged insurance firms to start disclosing their gender pay information ahead of next April’s deadline – and has led the charge by starting to do so itself.
The Institute has revealed that its mean hourly pay gap between men and women is currently 28%, compared to a sector average of 47% and national average of 14%; its median hourly rate gap is 18%, compared to sector average of 37% and national average of 10%.
Insurance businesses should disclose data on their gender pay information regardless of whether or not they are required to, the CII has urged.
“I am encouraging all businesses in the insurance sector to publish their data openly, even if, like the CII, their headcount is lower than the threshold required by the rules [250 employees],” CII chief executive Sian Fisher commented yesterday.
“We are a strong profession, and when we behave with confidence and purpose the public will trust us to deliver,” she went on to say. “However, if we are opaque or make excuses, they will question our ability to treat customers, as well as employees, fairly. Publishing our gender pay information is an opportunity to show that we recognise that we serve the whole of society, and we should take this opportunity.”
The issue of gender diversity has increasingly become a hot topic for the insurance industry in the past several years – so much so that it is now a top priority for virtually every board, Fisher told Insurance Business in an interview last month.
“The dialogue around diversity is certainly much greater than it used to be. There was a lot of work going on on diversity anyway, because it has been an issue, and certainly there has been an increasing focus on it for the last 10 years. But it’s really got going in the last five years,” she said.
“Firms are generally trying to bring in different voices, to not just hear the same thing and have everything done in the same way. Everyone realises that in financial services, as in any other sector, that can’t be the right way, given that customers are now much more diverse. If you don’t take that on board, you are going to go backwards,” the CEO commented.
But as well as attracting a diverse talent pool, the industry does still have work to do when it comes to retaining them, she said. The new Apprenticeship Levy, which came into force this year, could go some way to addressing that, by providing the industry with an opportunity not just to bring in new talent but to up-skill its existing workforce.
The CII’s move to reveal its gender pay information this week coincides with the publishing of a specially-commissioned briefing paper, ‘Mind the gap’, in which it outlines the key factors behind, the causes of, and what can proactively be done to bring about better balance in the industry.
“The data that firms are sharing between now and April 2018 is only the start,” Fisher said. “Our stakeholders want to see evidence of what we are doing individually and collectively to reduce the gap, and they will expect to see significant improvement in future years.”
She added: “Such a commitment is the foundation on which our culture is based and we are asking all those who work in our sector to join with us to tackle and resolve the gender gap.”
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