This article draws on original PhD research by Dr Abbey Atkinson, Senior Consultant at Cream Consulting, conducted across the UK insurance industry.
Women make up 60 percent of the UK insurance workforce. Yet only 7 percent of insurance CEOs are women. That number has barely shifted in a decade. If you work in insurance, you have probably noticed the pattern even if you have not named it. Women are present at every level of entry. They are increasingly visible in middle management. And then, somewhere between capable and consequential, they disappear.
Most organisations respond to this with the same set of interventions. Mentoring programmes. Confidence workshops. Flexible working policies. Women’s networks. These things are not without value. But the evidence suggests they are solving the wrong problem.
At the Insuretech Innovation Conference in May 2026, a panel on women in insurance leadership did something rare. It refused to stay comfortable. It drew on original research from Dr Abbey Atkinson, whose PhD thesis, built on over 150 hours of interviews and observations across the UK insurance industry, asks a question most organisations would rather not answer. Not why women are not trying hard enough. But why the conditions they are trying within were never designed to work for them.
This article draws on that research and that conversation. It is not about adding more women to a broken pipeline. It is about understanding why the pipeline leaks, and what it actually takes to fix it.
What this article covers:
- Why women leave senior roles in insurance and what the data actually shows
- The structural mechanisms that reproduce inequality, even in well-intentioned organisations
- Why flexible working, mentoring and networks often fail to close the gap
- What fixing the system looks like in practice for leaders and HR teams
- Five actions your organisation can take before the end of the quarter
The data behind the disappearing act
Before we get to solutions, it is worth sitting with the scale of what we are talking about. The gender pay gap in UK financial services and insurance sits at 29 percent, the widest of any UK sector. At the current rate of progress, gender parity in insurance will not arrive until 2158. That is not a rounding error. That is roughly five generations away.
UK insurance CEOs are women
Women hold only 29 of 431 CEO positions
Predicted year of gender parity
These are not simply numbers about representation. They are the downstream consequence of structural conditions that shape who gets seen, who gets trusted, who gets put forward, and who gets promoted. Understanding those conditions is where the work begins.
Dr Atkinson’s research names them clearly. Drawing on over 150 hours of qualitative fieldwork across the UK insurance industry, her thesis traces the mechanisms through which inequality reproduces itself, often invisibly, often in organisations that genuinely believe they are doing the right things.
The hidden architecture of inequality
To understand why inequality persists in organisations that oppose it, the research draws on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. His framework gives us three concepts that explain how unfairness can feel fair, even to those it disadvantages.
Habitus
The deeply ingrained way we act, speak and move through the world, shaped by upbringing, education and professional experience. In workplace settings, habitus shapes who shows up right without anyone needing to define what right actually means.
Field
The structured social space, the industry, the firm, the meeting room, where people compete for influence and reward. Every field has its own unwritten rules, its own definition of what credible looks like.
Capital
Anything that gives you an advantage in that field. Not just money, but networks, credentials, cultural familiarity, the ability to read a room, to speak the right language, to trigger instinctive trust.
What makes this framework both useful and unsettling is what it reveals about how bias operates. It does not need to be deliberate to be real. It works through what feels normal. Through gut instinct. Through the quiet conviction that someone just does not feel like leadership material. That phrase sounds neutral. It rarely is.
“She’s not quite ready for that stretch yet.” A phrase that can end a career. Exclusion dressed as care.
The research calls this symbolic violence, when inequality feels fair even to those on the receiving end. And misrecognition, when we accept unfair rules because we have stopped seeing them as rules at all. Both are pervasive in professional settings. Both are extremely difficult to challenge because they feel invisible.
Three interventions that are not working the way you think they are
Atkinson’s research identifies three mechanisms that organisations believe are solving the problem but which the data suggests are often reinforcing it.
Flexible working. In theory, flexibility supports inclusion. In practice, particularly in high-status roles, it is treated as a concession rather than a right. Women who use it find their commitment questioned. Their names stop coming up for high-visibility projects. Remote working often does not shorten the day, it extends it. The ideal worker, always available, always present, always on, remains stubbornly intact.
Networks. Career-defining conversations happen in pubs, on golf courses, in informal dinners where women are often absent or peripheral. Men’s networks tend to be older, more senior and embedded in revenue-generating work. Women’s networks, while deeply valued by participants, often lack the power to convert belonging into advancement. They build confidence. They do not change the rules of the game.
Trust. Trust functions as a form of cultural currency, most easily granted to those who feel familiar, who mirror existing leadership styles, who trigger the right instincts. For men, trust is often assumed. For women, it must be earned repeatedly, can be lost with a single misstep, and is frequently withheld under the guise of protection. The language is telling. She is not quite ready for that stretch yet. I would not want to see her burn out. Exclusion dressed as care.
of Lloyd’s market respondents cite male-dominated leadership as the primary cause of the shrinking female pipeline
LMA survey, November 2025
What the panel brought to life
What research can tell us in data and theory, a good panel can tell us in experience and texture. The women at the Insuretech Innovation Conference gave those findings a human dimension.
They spoke about the moment early in their careers when they first noticed the game was not quite the same for them. About being in rooms where the unspoken rules were written for someone else. About feedback that was never quite concrete enough to act on, work on how you come across, you need more gravitas, and the exhaustion of translating vague impressions into a development plan.
They spoke about the difference between being included and being influential. About mentoring that gave advice while sponsorship opened doors, and how rarely women received the latter. About networks that felt like safe spaces but not strategic ones.
One observation stayed in the room long after it was raised. Women who succeed in high-status roles often do so not by reshaping the role but by reshaping themselves. That is worth sitting with. And it is worth asking what that cost, to the individual, to teams, and to organisations that lose people they could not afford to lose.
From fixing women to fixing the field
Atkinson’s conclusion is direct. The industry does not need more women in the pipeline. It needs to transform the cultural and structural conditions that determine who is seen as leadership material in the first place.
That means redesigning high-status roles around output rather than presence. It means making the criteria for trust and readiness visible and accountable, rather than leaving them to gut instinct. It means connecting women’s networks to succession planning and strategic decision-making rather than keeping them adjacent to where power sits. It means training leaders to recognise misrecognition, to spot the moment when exclusion is dressed up as logic, protection or care.
And it means being honest about what meritocracy actually measures. If the system rewards those who already fit the dominant mould, who belong to the right networks, who trigger the right instincts in the right rooms, then merit is not what is being measured. Familiarity is.
of UK insurance customers want more women on boards. Governance diversity is now a customer expectation
GlobalData, 2024
What leaders in insurance should do next
These are not long-term culture programmes. They are questions and actions you can take back to your organisation this week.
- Audit your stretch assignment process. Ask who gets put forward and how those decisions are made. If the answer involves words like readiness or fit, ask what those words actually mean and who gets to define them.
- Review the language of your promotion conversations. Words like gravitas and presence can carry significant cultural weight. If they appear in feedback without concrete behavioural definition, they may be doing gatekeeping rather than development work.
- Test your flexible working policies against your highest-status roles. Are they genuinely compatible? Or do they quietly signal a different track? Real flexibility means the most powerful roles are as accessible on a flexible contract as any other.
- Connect your women’s network to succession planning. If the network has no visibility of, or input into, who is being considered for leadership roles, it is a support mechanism rather than a structural one. That is not enough.
- Make trust criteria visible. Where trust-based decisions, sponsorship, project allocation, promotion recommendations, are made informally, bring them into a structured process with defined criteria. Visibility is accountability.
