Few women on Italian insurance boards. Definitely less than on the boards of banks that do not already shine for inclusion and gender equality. In insurance companies, however, the roles of managing director and president are largely covered by men, women on the board are on average less than a fifth of board members. This is documented by a research conducted by Diana Capone, Flaminia Montemaggiori and Sara Butera and published in the Quaderni dell'Ivass. It is essential, the researchers conclude, that regulators and supervisors take a proactive role in advocacy diversity and inclusion in the insurance market.
The survey involved 122 insurance companies for 2015 and 108 for 2019, numbers which represent, respectively, all companies active in Italy on the same dates. The objective of the analysis was to evaluate the level of diversity not only within the boards but also in the top positions of president, general manager and managing director.
“Despite the political and social pressure towards greater inclusion of the female component in the boards and in the top roles of the corporate organization, the spontaneous progress towards the strengthening of the presence of women is very slow and does not allow to achieve gender equality.
In 2019, in fact, the female percentage was equal, on average, only to 17% of the total of directors, with a limited increase (7 percentage points) compared to 2015, the year in which women represented a tenth of the total board members. Also, as of the same date, about a third of the councils still consisted of only men, a high value even if down compared to 2015, when the female presence was completely absent in more than half of the councils. For top management the very limited female representation leads us to suppose that, even in the insurance sector, the progress of women towards roles of greater responsibility is hindered by the presence of a glass ceiling, which appears even more resistant precisely because the lack of a critical mass of adviser, which allows them to exercise an effective influence on company dynamics.
Source: Ivass - Notebook 22 - Women, boards and insurance companies
Unlike banks, in insurance no woman is president or CEO or director in the period covered by the survey. The Golfo-Mosca law introduced a restriction to rebalance the gender bias on the boards of listed companies: starting from renewals after January 2020 and with the exception of newly listed companies, at least 40% of the members must belong to the less represented gender . A threshold that is still far away in unlisted companies where the percentage of women on boards barely reaches 16% in the years covered by the research.
Overall, therefore, the difficulty remains in breaking the glass ceiling that allows the female presence to ascend to top roles. A distortion, the researchers point out, which it is essential to change.
