Insurance game tough for women

By TOM CLARKE

The insurance industry remains one in which women find it difficult to advance their careers, says one woman who has bucked the trend.

But Naomi Ballantyne, who has just been appointed chief operating officer of the insurance company Sovereign and is one of the few women to reach a senior position in the industry, says change is on the way. She began her career in insurance with Guardian Royal Exchange when she left university in 1982.

She followed that with two years with New Zealand Insurance and four years with Fidelity Life when, aged 24, she was recruited for the start-up at Sovereign.

She has been a member of the senior executive team for the past 10 years and a director of Sovereign Assurance since 1994.

She has employed women in roles not usually held by females in the industry and has appointed several women into management positions.

"I don't think I ever consciously recruited women - I think I just never consciously excluded women from the process," she says.

"As a result we've got a number of very competent female senior managers in the organisation, which means we've got a good balance of male and female. That wasn't the case in the early days, when I worked almost exclusively with men. "You get a different balance with different genders, and that has been really successful here.

"It's also a good role model for people coming through.

"In the case of talented young women, they can see there are opportunities for them within the organisation and that they don't have to look elsewhere to get ahead."

Most in surance industry CEOs are males in their 50s with lots of industry experience, and Naomi Ballantyne believes gender bias will continue until the latest generation of senior executives retires. However, that is starting to change, she says.

Some of her views are more radical than the insurance industry is accustomed to. One of her moves has been to employ people without insurance-industry backgrounds, a policy which she says has evolved over years of experience.

"In the early days we took people with experience, but found we couldn't change their mindset away from the `we're a big company - these are just customers' attitude, to an approach that says `we're here to serve the customers and that's all we're here to do.'

"The easiest way to handle that was to get people with the right attitude and teach them about insurance, and that worked so we continue to do that today.

"It's not that we will never take on people from the industry - it's just that we're very careful about their attitude when we do."

That means looking for people who will do well at anything they are given as a task - people who want to achieve, people who want to get ahead and people who are team players.

Naomi Ballantyne says that typically, in New Zealand, that means looking at people who do well at sport or music or some endeavour other than academic achievement.

With pure academics who don't have a lot of achievement elsewhere, there is a risk of their having no practical aptitude.

"Our experience has been that when you get people who've got competencies across the board, they tend to be the type of people who are good at anything they try," she says.

"What you get is a huge amount of energy and from a social aspect that creates a fantastic company to work with. It certainly makes going to work an absolute pleasure and an absolute challenge."