For the longest time, the insurance industry has been lacking in diversity and inclusion. Not just in the coverage accessible to different community groups, but even in the level of representation at the executive level within insurance companies in general. For example, the ABI's Talent & Diversity research in 2021 found that just 24% of executives in the insurance industry were women.Dame Inga Beale is the former CEO of Lloyd’s and has championed diversity in the UK insurance industry for years – and there’s much to be learned from her story. If you’re looking to build a D&I programme in your organisation, read on and find out how this underwriter ended up inspiring the industry for the better as she incisively answered key questions in our recent 2023 webinar.Q: What was it like to join the working world as a woman in the 1980s?A: Well, I felt like completely the odd one out. I was. So I started as a frontline underwriter. I was working in the company market on the periphery of Lloyds, and there were 35 underwriters, and I was the only female. When I was hired, I didn't know what I was getting myself into. But so I arrive in the office and think, “Oh, wow! I'm a bit like the odd one out here now”. We did have other women who were doing support functions.But actually, [...] I was the only female, and I wanted to be the same. I didn't want to be different, so I kind of changed my behaviour, and I became very “male”. I went down to the pub with all the guys. I could drink as many pints of beer as the guys could, you know because I didn't want to stand out from them as being different. I wanted them to think of me as one of the guys, and so much so that was so successful that one of the guys when he was getting married and he had his stag I was invited along. So I went along as kind of “one of the guys”. That was what I did to cope with it.Q: How was that on you as a person at that time? Was that something that you were struggling with or were you comfortable with it?A: I felt at that time like a heterosexual woman fighting in a man's world, and the way that I got my energy to keep going was through the sport I did. I was rowing first of all, and then I started playing Rugby, and I played roughly for 12 years. [In a Rugby team] you need all different types of people. So you learned you needed the big, tall ones you needed the short, faster ones. You needed the thin, skinny ones – you felt included all the time. So I think for me, my sport was my release valve. Then, there was a time when this incident happened, and my rage came up, and I said: “No. I can't do this anymore. I can't work with all these men.” We had a series of cocktail parties in the office for the Cricket World Championship that was taking place in the Caribbean, and the boss's wife worked at the Jamaican tourist board and got a bunch of posters advertising Jamaica as a holiday destination. It was a woman in a wet T-shirt, and I put up with it because most of the brokers and the clients that we wanted to entertain were men. And then weeks and weeks later, the posters were up, and I plucked up the courage on a Friday evening to go and see my boss and say: “I think I've been very patient. But can the posters come down?”. “Of course. How could we be so insensitive?” He said. And then the Monday morning I came in, and I found my desk and my chair and everything wrapped up in the posters. And… it just clicked a switch. And I walked straight out of the office. I didn't speak to anyone. My boss kept phoning my landline at home, leaving voicemails, you know. After 4 days I phoned him back, said: “I'm not coming back to work.” and that was in 1989. So I've been working for about… 8 years. And I just said... “Well, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna go around the world and I'm gonna travel.” So that's what happened. Q: How did their behaviour change in that year, or did you experience any difference in that behaviour towards you or the culture in the office as a result of what you did?A: Even when I came back a year later, there was still no female underwriter, so again support staff had other females, but not on the front line.When I got to Australia, after about 6 months, I needed money, so I got a job at the BBC and then I saw my first female role model: the boss of the BBC. In Sydney, even though Australia was a very chauvinistic place (they didn't even allow women to play Rugby in those days, and at least we were playing Rugby in the UK), but the boss was a woman.They called her ‘the boss’. They respected her, and the most important thing was, she wore trousers to the office. Because in those days in the city, as a woman, you couldn't wear trousers…You had to wear your you know your nice little dress, or probably your skirt. And I just thought, “Wow!” And she inspired me to be a bit different. So when I came back it was more about, “Do you know what – I'm not gonna fit in with you guys. I'm gonna be Inga. I'm going to be me and make it in my way.”Q: Maybe we can now fast forward a little bit. So you are in the Lloyds market, you are going back in as the CEO, How did you feel about your responsibility towards younger employees at that time?A: The previous CEO had resigned. I remember at that time thinking, “Oh, I wouldn't mind that job. I'd like to shake that market up a bit.” Then a few of us women – we’d formed a Senior Women's club in the insurance market years and years before – we had breakfast and we all sat around and went: “Anyone been asked for any female names for the list of candidates for the CEO of Lloyds?” And we knew who every senior woman there was, and we knew that no one had been asked. So two of us went to see the chairman at the time of Lloyds to complain – this was 2013. He didn't admit anything and just told us “Oh, you women just don't lean in enough”, and we were furious. So we left. Two days later, the headhunter kept calling me. Then when they started to interview me, I didn't believe them. I thought, “There's no way they can hire a woman”. I ended up getting the job. And I just thought, “Wow, I'm gonna get this job.” So I went in not thinking, to begin with, that I've got to change the market around diversity and inclusion. Then when I start the job, and I look out at the market – because it's a physical marketplace, with about 8,000 people meeting every day – you can see men. Very few faces of a different colour than white. Very few women. Still 2014, I heard people making homophobic remarks. I thought: “This is not tolerable”. This is disgusting and outrageous. And then, because I was the CEO, I was able to have regular town halls because I had to gather the CEOs of hundreds of companies. And that's when I said: “Why am I looking out at a sea of white faces? Why do I never see women in senior roles?”When I said that to the audience, I could see their heads physically going like “My God, not only we got the first woman. She's freaky! She's challenging the taboos that we wouldn't.” But because I started talking, I inspired this sort of grassroots movement. So then people would come to me: “Can we have a pride network, please? Can we have a women's network? Can we have a cultural network?”. I said, “of course”. Q: Did you ever feel like you couldn't affect the change you wanted to see in the organisation?A: Well, the resistance to it, of course, was enormous. But we started to embed things, and it became a business priority, and therefore, we had metrics around [diversity and inclusion] – just like we had metrics about growing the revenues – and therefore the managers and my executives had targets that they had to meet. And that was just part of all their regular targets, and that made a huge difference.And I still get asked today, “Is that the right thing?” I say absolutely, it's the right thing! Because you don't drive your top line or your bottom line without having metrics to aim for, do you? So if you want to make this change happen here, you've got to do the same – and they affected executive bonuses. Q: Were you ever conflicted between reacting as strongly as you felt you needed to put across the right message to the organisation, and that you were maybe connecting more aggressively than you wanted to in a particular situation?A: Yes, and I got that criticism from the Board. I think it was partway through my second year. The Chair had a very serious discussion with me. And he said to the Board: “I think you're talking too much about this topic and doing too much.”That was a battle. Then what I started to do was use others much more to be my voice. I remember asking this guy to head up inclusion at Lloyds, he was in his fifties. He wasn't [considered] ‘diverse’ there. And I asked him: “I need you to sign a voice piece because I get criticised about it.”He took that role on. He's still doing it today. He got so into it – which is why I think allyship can be so important, whether it's talking about LGBT or age, or race, or anything. Q: Getting somebody who wasn't from a minority community to be the advocate for diversity within the organisation – is that advice that you see others implementing across other organisations that you've interacted with? Or do you think people systematically miss the mark on that? A: I don't think they're doing it proactively enough. If you look at the number of diversity and inclusion officers there are – I'm glad that people are recruiting them – when I was working years ago, that wasn't a career, so often they're chosen specifically because they're from a certain community. Now, maybe that's not a bad thing, because they can talk from the heart which I suppose benefited me as the CEO. After all, I could talk from experience. You know, I know what it was like because I was in the closet when I first dated a woman. I stayed in the closet for years. I didn't let anyone know I was in a relationship with a woman. I did all the stuff where you change what you think about the words you're going to say. You degenderise every word you say to anybody. Because you just don't want to admit that you're in a same-sex relationship. So I went through that. I then went through the period of coming out. Which was in 2007, and then I knew what that felt like “Oh, gosh! Now I'm out as a lesbian”. It was just fantastic, it was energising. It lifted this weight off my shoulders. My wife, we got married, and then, after 12 years, she left me, and then I dated a man, and then I had this new label of being bisexual. So then I got excluded from the very group of lesbians who'd been so supportive because they said “But now, you with a man, we can't socialise with you anymore,” because we do things in all-women groups. Having experience means you can talk much better about it. But it was interesting because I was doing a lot at Lloyds, and I was talking about it, and I could talk about a lot of it genuinely. Q: When D&I leaders from one community lead a D&I movement, they often forget the perspectives of other communities as they’re speaking from their own lived experiences – but would someone from none of the communities be able to have a more unbiased and broader perspective on D&I? A: The only way to get this right is to include as many communities as you can, and I’ll tell you how I messed up once: We made this graphic around the walls of Lloyd's history because it was formed in 1688. It's got an amazing history. And it survived the Titanic! It's just gone through everything, and I thought this was very interesting. So we put this graphic on the wall, and then we opened it. We had this big party, and then there was a black guy at Lloyds, and he was at the party, and he said: “Inga – do you know what you haven't mentioned the slave trade?”. And I thought, “Gosh, right. Lloyds used to insure the slaughter.” I mean, it’s a dreadful, dreadful thing of its past, awful. But to him, we'd glossed over it and ignored it instead of owning up to this misdemeanour. And he was really upset. I didn't have a black person in that small group who did the final approval. You know, the little things like that have taught me that yes, it takes time to do this, but if you want to get it right, and you want to show that you want all types of people, you've got to make sure you're including them and getting their input.Q: What should leaders do to launch a D&I initiative in an organisation? A: I remember when all the big consulting firms for the insurance sector told me they were getting so many mandates now for helping companies do exactly that. And I thought, “This is great!”. At least people are spending money on it.But you see I'm not so much of a strategic initiative person around this, partly because this is people and we're all individuals. And therefore, however big or small your organisation is, I think, if you ask the people who are there what they want and what they need, that is the best way. I started talking about things that Lloyds. We didn't have that much structure then. I just knew we had to do things, and I think this is the most important thing. And the other thing is, however big your organisation is, try to allow the real conversations to happen safely. We don't want people who are homophobic arguing with a gay person about the “rights” or “wrongs” of it, or a racist conversation going on, but we do need to understand what people are feeling. Because we're not just machines. And somehow, I would encourage people to enable somewhat safe conversations so people can say how they're feeling, what their fears are – because often this stuff is about fear. You don't want to change. You've got to somehow enable this freedom for people to express their views.And that's when we start learning. You get all that you feel about it. “Oh, if I say this, that's okay. But if I say that that isn't okay.” And you can do that in a 300-person, even a 10-person organisation.It’s not that I don’t think you need these strategic initiatives – because you do, and in big corporations, of course, you do – what I'm saying is, it doesn't have to start like that. It's much better to start by including all the people you have.Q: What are your views on this “people mandating” back to work? Do you think that's a step forward, a step backwards from inclusivity? A: I think it's a backwards step. You should be able to, with technology, almost work anywhere. But I know that people are fearful about losing that cultural bond, particularly new people joining an organisation. So you've got to get the balance right. But this “demanding people come back to the office” in the way that some companies are doing it – to me, it's not necessarily the best thing. Because we want to move on. I saw this COVID thing as being a real enabler to be more inclusive. For instance, the board meetings that we had during COVID because they were all by Zoom or Teams. We were able to include presenters in those meetings who would never normally have gotten the exposure, or the opportunity to speak to the senior people. We suddenly just enlarged the number of people who had access to the Board, who we had exposure to as a Board to get to know them. It was amazing. And I thought: “This is going to be a real game changer” in terms of giving opportunities, new opportunities, to people. And this traditional way of working, and thinking that “you can only trust them if they're under your eyes”, that, I hope, has gone away. Because people should be setting proper goals and objectives to measure people's output.You've got to get people together now and then so that they can feel the culture, there’s got to be flexibility around it. I hope people just don't mandate it full stop.Q: For people trying to convince their CEOs of their senior leadership, what numbers would you say they should pay the closest attention to?A: Most of you will probably do employee engagement surveys, and provided you've got a good, healthy culture where people are completing that, you've got good participation rates. When I arrived at Lloyds, there was a box for entering your sexuality, and less than 10% of the employees completed it. I arrived and started talking about this stuff and within a year, over 90% of the people completed that field. And then we were able to slice and dice for engagement data and show to everybody happy, who was unhappy and all the rest of it. And then people started to understand why we were collecting the data – because we said, we want to uncover if there are groups of people who aren't feeling as engaged as others. But you've got to do the groundwork to get that culture going. Because surely you'll see the more engaged your people are, the more productive you are. And if you can then show various groups that are less engaged or more engaged, and then try to understand why – I think it's a nice way to start.I insisted that we had targets for women in senior positions. And we set a target of 40% women and at least, 50% men. Because I didn't want it to be just for the women. So I wanted to have this balance so you could have at least 40% women, and at least 40% men in senior roles. So that was what we did. And we are well on our way. I think we got to 37 1/2 females from something in the teens when I started.So that was progress. And then, as we started to gather more data, and people were willing to talk about their sexuality, and we got people to be open about their racial backgrounds, we were then able to set targets for representation at many levels. Focus on those senior levels. Because if you don't change the senior folk, it fundamentally will not make that big of a difference in the organisation.Q: If you had to leave us with one message, what would it be?A: It's about the persistence. Some CEOs will think: “It's on the job list,” you know, “Get it done”. But it's not. It is so much about people’s emotions and feelings. You cannot just treat it in that way, and that means you need absolute persistence. And you need to approach this from every single angle you can think of.And it is not linear. It is a journey. But, please, whatever you do – don't give up and keep that persistent approach.About YuLife.YuLife is working to reimagine the insurance industry by protecting lives, rewarding living and inspiring life. We’re on a mission to transform traditional insurance into a life-enhancing experience every employee will value and use daily. How does it work? Our award-winning app uses behavioural science and game mechanics to reward your people for living well while offering protection in case of crisis. And with our top-rated employee assistance programme, your team gets access to mental, financial and social support, virtual GPs, nutritionists, life coaches and more to help them live their best lives.Because we believe that your employees should benefit from their insurance from day one – and that wellbeing should be accessible every day, for everyone.Request a demo for your team today.