Insurance is, in most respects, a female-majority industry. Women make up roughly 59% of the global insurance workforce. They are the majority of underwriters, the vast majority of claims processors, and they are overwhelmingly the first point of contact for customers navigating some of the most significant financial decisions of their lives. The talent is clearly there.
And yet, when you look at who is actually leading the industry, the picture changes sharply. Only around 22% of insurance C-suite executives are women, and just 7% of insurance CEOs are women, which is 29 out of 431 positions globally. The proportion of women on the boards of the 60 largest insurers has risen from 2.5% in 2006 to around 20% in 2024. Progress, measured across decades, is real. But the pace is not commensurate with the scale of the problem, and there are growing signs that the conditions required to sustain even this rate of progress are weakening.
From our position conducting executive search across the global insurance and reinsurance market, we see this tension play out directly. Clients want more diversity in their leadership teams. Boards are asking sharper questions about succession. But when we go looking for the pipeline of senior women to fill those roles, we find it thinner than it should be, and in some cases, thinner than it was. This piece sets out why we believe the problem is structural, where it breaks down, and what the organisations most effectively addressing it are doing differently.
The Numbers Behind the Narrative
The headline statistics are striking on their own terms. But the more revealing picture emerges when you look beneath the aggregate. Across representation, pipeline depth, and external hiring, the data tells a consistent story: the gap is wider than it appears, and it is concentrated most acutely at the levels that matter most.
- Women make up ~59% of the global insurance workforce, yet hold only ~22% of C-suite positions, which is fewer than one in four. (Insurance Information Institute, 2025)
- Only 7% of insurance CEOs are women, just 29 out of 431 CEO positions globally. (Brighter Consultancy, 2025)
- Women of colour hold just 3% of insurance C-suite roles. Only 1 in 35 direct reports to insurance CEOs is a woman of colour. Black women make up more than 7% of the entry-level insurance workforce, but that number falls to virtually zero at the C-suite. (Insurance Information Institute, 2025 / McKinsey, 2024)
- Board-level representation among the 60 largest global insurers has risen from 5% in 2006 to around 20% in 2024, which is meaningful progress but still far short of parity. (KPMG Global Female Leaders Outlook, 2025)
As Kate Markham, CEO of Hiscox London Market, has noted: "We have areas of great gender diversity, but when you peel away one layer, it is not always consistent across the organisation... promoting female talent requires there to be a breadth of gender-diverse talent underneath them, ready to step up."
Where the Pipeline Actually Breaks
The instinct is to treat the gender gap in insurance leadership as a senior-level problem, to be solved through senior-level interventions. In our experience, this is a misdiagnosis. The problem begins much earlier, and the consequences compound over time.
The broken rung is not a metaphor
Research consistently shows that women in insurance are significantly less likely than their male peers to be proactively developed for leadership at the critical early stages of their careers. In McKinsey and LeanIn's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, only 31% of women at entry level had a sponsor, compared to 45% of men. Separately, 40% of women had not received a promotion, stretch assignment, or leadership training in the previous two years. This is not primarily a pipeline problem. It is a development infrastructure problem.
The aspiration is there. Research from Liberty Mutual and Safeco Insurance found that 85% of women in frontline insurance roles can picture themselves as a leader. But those same women are significantly less likely than their male colleagues to say their manager is actively developing them for that future. The ambition exists; the system is not meeting it.
Digital transformation is making the gap wider
The industry's shift towards AI, data analytics, and digital distribution was supposed to create new routes to leadership. In practice, it is often doing the opposite for women. The McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2024 study found that women in financial services and insurance reported difficulty accessing training for new technologies including AI, and were frequently passed over for roles leading digital transformation initiatives.
This matters significantly for leadership succession. The leaders who will sit in C-suite roles in five to ten years are those who are visibly shaping the industry's digital future today. If women are systematically excluded from those opportunities at the mid-career stage, the pipeline does not simply grow slowly. It narrows. A May 2025 report from the International Labour Organization found that if jobs most highly exposed to generative AI displacement were to disappear, two women would be displaced for every man, and women are nearly twice as likely as men to work in roles at high risk of automation globally. In insurance, where clerical and processing roles have historically been female-dominated, the risk is acute.
The pay gap is a retention problem in disguise
Finance and insurance carries the widest gender pay gap of any major industry sector. Women in the sector earn just 78 cents for every dollar earned by men, despite comprising 53% of the industry workforce. Payscale's 2026 report confirms that gap has widened further, with women across the economy now earning 82 cents on the dollar, down from 83 cents the prior year.
The implications for retention are direct. When pay gaps persist or widen, women become more likely to disengage, seek alternative employment, or exit the workforce entirely. The departure is often quiet and gradual, and it disproportionately affects the mid-to-senior level where the pipeline is already thinnest.
The Headwinds Are Growing
The structural problems outlined above have been present for years. What has changed recently is the external environment around them.
Corporate commitment to gender diversity is declining. The McKinsey and LeanIn Women in the Workplace 2024 report found that 78% of companies described gender diversity as a high priority, down from 87% in 2019, and described progress as 'fragile and unsustainable' in the context of declining institutional commitment. An EY study reported that the number of women being appointed as financial services directors almost halved in a single year, from 61% in 2022 to 33% in 2023.
Against the backdrop of wider DEI rollbacks across corporate America and parts of Europe, 79% of women surveyed in 2025 said they believed those rollbacks would negatively affect their opportunities, specifically in leadership positions, pay equity, and protections against bias.
The organisations that step back from structured gender diversity programmes are not simply pausing progress. They are actively narrowing their future options in a market where senior female talent is already scarce. A pipeline that was already under pressure is now operating without some of the structural supports it relied on: formal sponsorship programmes, targeted development initiatives, and diversity hiring commitments.
The Business Case Is Stronger Than the Awareness of It
Despite everything outlined above, the business case for gender-diverse leadership in insurance has never been more clearly evidenced.
Organisations with greater gender diversity in leadership roles see 15% higher profitability on average. Companies with at least 30% female board representation consistently outperform peers on financial returns, governance metrics, and employee outcomes. Bloomberg Intelligence analysis found that gender-diverse boards deliver between 2% and 5% higher annual returns compared to less diverse peers.
The customer dimension reinforces this commercial logic. Women are projected to be responsible for up to $1.7 trillion in insurance purchases by 2030. More than 50% of UK insurance customers already say they want to see greater female representation in insurance boardrooms, and that sentiment is increasingly shaping perceptions of institutional credibility.
The organisations winning on this are not doing so by accident. Allianz, over a sustained multi-year programme, successfully placed women into 30% of their leadership roles, including board-level positions, through a deliberate combination of succession planning, sponsorship, equal pay commitments, and employee networks. These are not outliers. They are blueprints.
What the Most Effective Organisations Are Doing Differently
Across our work conducting searches and advising leadership teams globally, we see consistent patterns separating the organisations making genuine progress from those that are standing still. The distinction is rarely about intent. It is almost always about architecture.
Fix the pipeline before you focus on the top
The most common mistake we see is treating C-suite diversity as the primary goal rather than the outcome. Sustainable diversity at the top of an insurance business requires sustained investment several layers below it. The organisations making the most durable progress are auditing their development programmes, promotion criteria, and sponsorship allocations specifically at the manager and director level. They are not waiting until a C-suite vacancy opens to ask where the candidates are.
Move from mentorship to sponsorship
There is an important distinction between mentoring a woman and sponsoring her. Mentorship offers guidance and support. Sponsorship puts someone's name in the room, specifically and actively, when decisions are being made about stretch roles, visible assignments, and advancement. The data is clear: employees with sponsors are twice as likely to be promoted. (McKinsey, Women in the Workplace 2025) In insurance, which operates as one senior industry figure has described it as 'an apprentice business' where leaders are shaped through proximity and experience, sponsorship is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism through which women access the parts of the organisation that build leadership credibility.
Interrogate the search brief
Organisations often unintentionally narrow their shortlists through the way they write senior hiring specifications. Requirements that assume a traditional career trajectory, a certain kind of P&L experience, or a particular institutional pedigree can exclude highly capable women who have built equally strong credentials through different but entirely valid routes. In our experience, the most successful diverse placements at executive level come from deliberately broadening the definition of 'qualified': not lowering the bar, but being honest about where the bar has been set for historical rather than functional reasons.
Build external pipelines before a vacancy opens
The internal pipeline is under pressure across the industry, and the majority of senior women are not actively looking for new roles at any given moment. Waiting for a critical leadership position to open and then hoping for a diverse shortlist is the wrong sequence entirely. The organisations best positioned to hire diverse senior talent are those that have been building relationships with high-potential women through talent mapping, market intelligence, and succession planning conversations well in advance of need.
Treat the pipeline audit as a board-level question
The 'isolated lagoon' problem, a concentration of senior women with limited depth below them, is a structural risk that belongs on the board agenda. A genuine audit of female representation by level, function, business unit, and geography will reveal where the gaps are before they become crises. The boards asking this question now are the ones who will be better positioned when the next wave of senior retirements accelerates further talent pressure across the industry.
Closing
The insurance industry has a genuine opportunity to lead on this. It is an industry where women are already embedded across every function and at every level below the senior tier. The talent is present. The demand for diverse leadership is rising. The business case is robust and growing.
But the window for proactive action is narrowing. The pipeline below the C-suite is under pressure from multiple directions: structural, economic, and political. The organisations that treat gender diversity as a genuine strategic priority, and invest in it accordingly, are building a competitive advantage that will be difficult for others to replicate quickly.
The ones that wait for a moment of urgency, whether a retirement wave, a succession gap, or a board challenge on diversity, will find the market does not respond to urgency with the speed they need.
The question is not whether this matters. It is whether it is being treated with the same seriousness as any other strategic risk.
Eliot Partnership is the only global executive search firm dedicated exclusively to the insurance and reinsurance industry. We work with the world's leading insurers, reinsurers, brokers, and specialty platforms to build leadership teams equipped for what's next. To speak with our team about gender diversity strategy, succession planning, or executive search, visit eliotpartnership.com.
