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To rise in four years from underwriter-broker to manager of a team of underwriters, then 10 years’ later to be made senior vice president at your company, equals success. It happened to Crane, and she credits it to hard work and to toughness. For, to Crane, success is not reserved for the male gender.
“I always tell younger people, you got to work hard. Put the time in. I still don’t look at that as a male versus female world. I think that anybody who works hard could be successful,” Jenny Crane, senior vice president of wholesale insurance intermediary Hull tells Insurance Business.
Crane describes herself as tough. Never showing her emotions at work, she feels this may be a reflection of the business she is in. “It develops the professional mentality of you can’t show emotion. If you show emotion, it’s gonna bite you. I think men get caught up in that too,” she says.
Crane does not deny that insurance is male dominated at the senior levels, a fact that struck her in 2007 when she joined management and found three other women there, versus twenty men. However, she feels lucky that her company is not hostile to women. She says: “I feel blessed. I’ve worked for a company where I’m respected, treated fairly and never felt that, ‘Hmm. If I was a male, I’d get paid more or have more recognition.’ ”
Women need confidence and to remove their emotions from the equation at work, says Crane. However, admits she was not always confident in herself. She doubted the choice of her company when she was promoted to manager, in 2006, for example. However, she drummed up her confidence by telling herself: “I can learn the business side of it; I can learn how to report all these numbers to corporate. I can learn that.”
Once in, she found that managing people came naturally to her. And the approach she took was sensitive: to manage people the way she would want to be managed.
She says: “I [always say] that I only hire people that I’ve mentored, not managed. I get so much joy watching my employees succeed in life … growing in their careers and moving to higher positions.”
Despite the low levels of women in senior positions in insurance Crane still believes there are good opportunities to be had. She wants more women emboldened to enter the brokerage side of insurance. She says: “There’s a lot of great women that [get] stuck in CSR [but they should] not be afraid to go for the broker role or the management role because I do think our industry is very open to women.”
“There are just great opportunities for women,” she says.
Jenny Crane is senior vice president of wholesale insurance intermediary Hull and Company.
