Insurers should focus more on actions they are taking to improve diversity than on their gender pay gap figures, according to the U.K.'s insurance professionalism body.
The comments come as the U.K.'s biggest insurers demonstrated a mixed performance at closing their gender pay gaps in 2018, with the gap narrowing at five and widening at four of the 10 largest by gross written premium that were required to report.
U.K. companies with more than 250 employees have had to report median hourly gender pay gap figures since new rules came into force in April 2017. The figures show the gap between the combined pay of men and that of women across a company, but they do not show whether men and women doing the same jobs are paid equally.
"I'd be keen for organizations not to fixate on the number," said Tali Shlomo, people engagement director at the U.K.'s Chartered Insurance Institute. "What is really important is to focus on the root cause and that then leads into the actions that firms can take to narrow the gap."
She reiterated what she said when the first figures were released in 2018 — that it would take around five years "before we see some significant changes" to the U.K. insurance industry's gender pay gap. She added that she was not concerned with the mixed performance year over year, because "it demonstrates we are on a live, authentic journey."
Varied progress
Of the five insurers that narrowed their pay gap year over year, the sharpest drop was at Legal & General Group PLC, where the gap fell 2.6 percentage points to 29.9%, just beating Lloyd's of London's 2.2-point reduction. Any widening of gaps was more muted, with the largest being the 1.2-point rise at Scottish Widows Group Ltd.
RSA Insurance Group PLC reported no change, and the figures exclude two insurers that had fewer than 250 employees.
The top five brokers fared slightly better, with only Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. reporting an increase, to a 40.0% gap in 2018 from 38.4% in 2017. Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc. made the most progress on closing its pay gap, reducing it by 4.6 percentage points to 36.5%.
Beyond the top companies, Lloyd's broker Price Forbes & Partners Ltd. remained the company with the biggest median gender pay gap in the U.K. insurance industry, at 52.7%, although this was down from the 57% it reported for 2017. The smallest gender pay gap in the industry belongs to broker Howserv Ltd., which is part of Gibraltar-based travel insurance group Staysure and where women were paid 7.1% more than men.
Price Forbes declined to comment, but the company said in its latest gender pay gap report that the difference was down to 73% of its workforce being male and an "over-representation" of men in its top two pay quartiles. The broker said it recognized that its gender pay gap "is not where we would like it to be" and that it is committed to "doing what we can to address the issue."
Among its efforts, the report said, are providing a flexible working policy for both men and women, "enhanced" maternity pay and developing "future senior female leaders throughout the business."
Continued effort
Shlomo at the Chartered Insurance Institute said she was encouraged by the fact that the gender pay gap, and diversity and inclusion more generally, are now firmly on U.K. insurers' and brokers' agendas.
"The fact that we are all on this journey and committed to the journey and committed to evolve our profession I feel very proud of," she said, adding that the need to recruit new employees serves as a natural bulwark against any tendency to ignore the issue.
She noted that millennials in particular "really look for diversity and inclusion" when job-hunting but noted that it was not confined to them. She said: "If we want to attract new talent ... surely fairness and equity and inclusion is critical in that."