Achieving gender equality at Swiss Re

We regard increasing gender balance in leadership as a strategic imperative and have launched concrete initiatives to do so.

Swiss Re is a signatory to the United Nation’s Global Compact and deeply committed to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal #5: “To achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”. At Swiss Re, we believe that increasing gender balance in leadership is a strategic imperative that is critical to our future business success.

We recognise that women continue to be underrepresented at executive/senior management levels, and our Group Executive Committee (Group EC) members are committed to closely monitoring the talent flows in their businesses and locations to actively improve the situation. We are focused on increasing the number of women who join Swiss Re at all levels, ensuring diverse candidate slates as well as diverse selection panels. “Gender Promotion Ratio” is a key internal performance metric for each of our Group EC members: comparing the ratio of female promotions into middle management and above with the ratio of women in the “donor pool”. Whilst we are doing well here, we recognise the need to work on other measures to address imbalances in the gender composition of our workforce.

In 2018, we continued to build on initiatives started the year before, such as the global female sponsorship initiative designed to build a strong female pipeline for impactful leadership positions. Over 60 women are currently paired up with an executive sponsor, including all Group EC members.

In March, we acknowledged the International Women’s Day by engaging all major locations in a dialogue on Gender Intelligence®: the social norms on gender, how they demonstrate at the workplace and what inclusive behaviour looks like.

We have been included as a member of the 2019 Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index (GEI, www.bloomberg.com/gei), which underscores our strong commitment to gender-related topics and an inclusive work environment.