Broker Diversity Push: Improved broking gender diversity across the leadership board in latest FOI data

Last year Insurance Age revealed that at the end of August women held only 15.7% of approved senior management roles across the sector. The data was drawn from six key senior management functions regulated by the FCA (see box).

At the time the indicator was moving in the wrong direction having fallen from 15.72% in 2020.

In the latest update, bringing the benchmark to the end of 2022, the decline has reversed to an uptick with rises across all posts.

Overall, for firms with permission to trade as general insurance brokers and sell non-investment contracts, 16.6% of the regulated positions were held by women.

As the graph below makes clear, broking has started to outperform the gender diversity measurement for the full financial services population regulated by the FCA. This though, it should also be noted, was mainly driven by a reported fall in diversity of the full FCA regulated leadership landscape.

While the broking improvement is to be welcomed, the short timeframe since August means drawing definitive conclusions should be avoided. The purpose was to establish the benchmark for the full year.

The belief is that what gets measured gets done and Insurance Age commits to repeating the data process on an annual basis to track future progress in this crucial area.

Particularly as there were still only 1,974 women in the six posts in broking compared to 9,845 men.

Rise

The FCA does not systematically record the gender of individuals and bases its response on salutations used such as Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms. The remainder of the broking cohort, 75 people, is made up of gender neutral salutations such as doctor or professor, and instances of the field in the FCA’s records being left blank.

The six roles, across governing and required functions, chosen for the FOI were the SMFs for core firms as detailed by the regulator.

As the full results below set out, there has been a rise in the number of female broking CEOs – by percentage and in total from 105 to 113 – but the proportion remains below 10%.

In by far the biggest section, executive directors, there were 100 women fewer approved as broking SMF3 – 1,321 in total – but the percentage rose as the size of the overall group fell.

Governing functions

Among the remaining governing functions set out by the FCA, the biggest percentage rise of female post holders came in the chair section, which like CEOs is still to reach 10%.

Partners, which previously had the best performing metric in this four-role subset, retained its pack-leader status here with a 21.32% result.

Turning to the two areas covered by required functions, there were substantial rises in both.

The percentage of female compliance oversight officers, at 23.2%, was the top figure across the FOI, while money laundering reporting officers also broke through the 20% barrier to reach 20.49%. Including male post holders and ‘unknown’ responses, both categories had fewer than 1000 people in total.

Campaign

After the initial FOI, Insurance Age launched the Broker Diversity Push campaign with the strapline Gender Leadership Gap.

It is designed to be an ally to the sector as a platform for debate and means of best practice exchange to challenge everyone to do better.

The campaign title of ‘push’ was deliberately chosen to help foster engagement and harness the efforts already being made.

So far the campaign includes 20 articles with engagement from men and women, people of all ages, large and smaller brokers, insurers and trade bodies.

We plan to continue to play a leading role in the debate with ongoing roundtables, opinion-led articles, and statistical analysis, and will widen the campaign to include all aspects of diversity under the ‘Broker Diversity Push’ umbrella.

The final question is: then how can you help, and be helped?

Get in touch with us and share your thoughts.

The results in full

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