Despite the years of heightened focus on race and gender, the insurance industry is lagging to rid itself of its legacy as a white-male network.
Executive Summary
"When Black women lead, they bring to the surface the previously overlooked attributes of all people," writes PDT Global's Nicole Simmonds-Johnson, in this article advocating a realignment of power in an industry known for a good-old-boy network of white male leaders. "As the most oppressed class, Black women lie at the intersection of workplace oppression, dealing with countless microaggressions, lack of empathy and unearned distrust. This ill-fated positioning has created a hierarchical reality where premiere seating is reserved for white men and regresses down to Black women who bear this system's weight," she observes.As household insurance firms incorporate diversity and inclusion into their core values and create new roles of chief diversity officers to tokenize their Black talent, their labor statistics tell a different story. In 2019, the percentage of Black employees in the insurance workforce landed at just 12.4 percent and the median number of female executives and officers is about 23 percent. Black women land at the intersection of these two disappointing realities; yet, they are the key to answering the insurance industry’s quest for inclusion.
