Briefing: Addressing the insurance technology skills gap bottleneck after Girls in Tech bids farewell

When the closure of Girls in Tech was announced last week (July 2024), it may have come as a surprise to many.

Founded in 2007, the non-profit organisation – which aimed to close the gender gap in the technology sector – had previously been going strong for 17 years. It boasted around 250,000 members across 35 global chapters.

Girls in Tech founder and chief executive Adriana Gascoigne initially broke the news of the closure on social media site LinkedIn, confirming the announcement with a “heavy heart”.

She continued: “While Girls in Tech bids you farewell, the journey towards equality doesn’t end here. We must persist in breaking barriers, challenging norms and inspiring the next generation of women in tech.

“Together, we can create a future where diversity and innovation thrive. Stand with us, stay resilient and keep pushing forward.”

Following Gascoigne’s post, the insurtech community spoke out about the sadness of this initiative ending, which was rumoured to be because of a lack of funding.

Melissa Collett, chief executive of Insurtech UK, said: “Collectively, as a sector, we need to address the challenges and continue to champion gender equality in tech.”

Laura Drabik, chief evangelist at software company Guidewire, served on the board of Girls in Tech.

For her, although the organisation’s closure is ”a shame”, she also feels that ”it might also provide our industry and other sectors the opportunity to rethink how we work together to bring women together in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) organisations and initiatives to create a greater force forward on this important topic”.

Girls in Tech’s closure, however, is not an isolated case.

In April 2024, charity Women Who Code also announced its closure, again due to a lack of funding.

Women Who Code launched in 2011. It held more than 20,000 events in the years since it opened and awarded £2.8m in scholarships.

According to its most recent financial report, published in 2022, the charity’s expenses exceeded its revenue.

For Ed Gaze, chief executive and co-founder of Innovative Risk Labs, “these kinds of initiatives are good, but hard to measure”.

Social engineering

Across the insurance and insurtech sectors, women are typically few and far between. They are also often underrepresented in senior roles.

For example, data published by specialist employment law firm GQ Littler in December 2023, revealed that just 29 out of 431 top bosses across the insurance sector are women.

But why is this?

I spoke to Crescens George, chief executive of learning and recruitment provider Wiser Academy, and he told me that “the first challenge of insurtech and insurance is that it has been struggling to attract young women”.

He continued: ”We know there are very few young women entering trades like construction. [It is] similar to how young girls see plumbing and other physical trades. The root cause is a by-product of social engineering.”

Nutan Rajguru, head of analytics for UK and Europe at Verisk, agreed that data science and analytics within insurance is a “male dominated” sector.

She said: “The insurance industry has had a long history of being white male dominated for such a long time – at least it’s [now] changing.

“Technology is one of the areas that is ahead [of the curve]. Data science is such an attractive job, everyone thinks of large language models in particular. Hopefully there will be more women coming into the industry.”

Bottleneck

Despite the benefits of initiatives such as Girls in Tech, George noted that these schemes could, however, divert responsibility for addressing workplace diversity from individual firms, meaning that some companies could pass the buck when it comes to spearheading suitable initiatives.

He further added that the UK’s education system provides “no support” or advice for young girls and boys in terms of varied career options. For example, although many insurers and brokers have graduate schemes, George argued that “top graduates are flocking to Microsoft and Google”.

He continued: “[Graduates] are not proactively considering insurance or insurtech. We need to be more proactive and reach out before students leave their campuses.”

One example here would be offering young women access to a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, a step which George believes could help spark an interest in the insurance sector’s technology jobs.

“There is a bottleneck with initiatives [like Girls in Tech]. Certainly, these initiatives created an inflow of talent,” he added.

”If you think from a highly strategic point of view, these initiatives and the people funding it would also want to see young talent coming in, staying and then rising through the ranks. That’s where the bottleneck is. These initiatives couldn’t really show the long-term strategic returns.”

Job opportunities

But why is retention low for women in insurtech and insurance technology jobs?

George noted that “women have to juggle too many things”, such as childcare or carer responsibilities, on top of demanding jobs – luckily, the move towards increased remote and hybrid working has mitigated some of this dilemma by facilitating greater flexibility.

For example, in January 2022, Zurich saw the demand for part-time jobs nearly double – from 6% to 11% – since the launch of its flexible working initiative in March 2019. This scheme saw the insurer advertise all vacancies as part-time, full-time or job share opportunities, written in gender neutral language.

There is also a growing skills gap across the sector, as technology in insurance and insurtech continues to evolve – claims, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are just some of the areas were this gap is apparent.

A July 2020 report from global management consultancy McKinsey and Company, titled Transforming the talent model in the insurance industry, found that 10% to 55% of all roles in insurance – from underwriting, acturial, claims, finance and operations – could be automated over the next decade. 

When I first started writing about insurtech and insurance technology back in July 2018, the situation was different because the insurance industry was behind in terms of technology.

Since then, advancements in technology have laid open new job prospects and roles. In turn, this could entice new talent to the sector – including young women, men and people from various ethnic minorities. 

However, employers in insurance must be flexible with their working models and adapt roles to suit hybrid or remote working environments, in addition to upskilling staff to better understand new technology.

This, I hope, will foster the talent that the industry is after in terms of technology and create better opportunities for women – filling the void left by the closure of important initiatives such as Girls in Tech.

If this opportunity is ignored, the insurance industry faces the prospect of the technology skills gap widening – and with the pace of AI progressing, that could end in major disappointment as firms fail to keep up with the pace of change.