#womentorship in Insurance: 8 Reasons to Apply to Female Founders in InsurTech

My name is Violet Rizzieri and I am a rising sophomore at Bowdoin College studying mathematics and neuroscience, and this summer I’m working at Quesnay as a Strategy & Innovation Intern focusing on the Female Founders in InsurTech 2020 innovation competition.

As I learn more about the insurance industry, I find myself asking questions: why is mentorship so crucial for women, what is the role of diversity as it relates to gender equality, why is 2020 such a pivotal moment for female leadership, and as COVID-19 accentuates inequality and disproportionately hurts those with less power and privilege, how can we all work to ensure female leaders will continue to make progress in male-dominated fields?

Here's some of what I’ve learned in my research:

1. Rising Tide: How Female Mentorship Helps Entrepreneurs (Stephanie Vozza, Mastercard Biz, October 21, 2019)

a) The best tools and practices for advancing female entrepreneurs are mentorship programs. 84% of CEOs with mentors said relationship helped them avoid costly mistakes and become proficient faster, 71% said their company performance improved.

b) Mentorship fosters a sense of community for female entrepreneurs who can feel isolated when starting their own businesses.

c) Mentorship improves leadership and management skills for the mentee, and strengthens the entrepreneurial landscape for women across the board.

2. 39 Stats About Diversity in Entrepreneurship (Lestraundra Alfred, Hubspot, May 27, 2020)

a) In 2019, female-founded companies received 2.7% of the total capital invested in venture-backed businesses in the U.S.

b) For every dollar generated by a privately held company, women-owned companies generated 30 cents in 2019.

c) As of 2019, women-owned businesses in the U.S. employed 9.4 million workers and generated $1.9 trillion in revenue.

d) According to The Secret Life of Entrepreneurs Study commissioned by NPR’s “How I Built This”, 41% of women entrepreneurs report experiencing gender bias, and 33% of women of color entrepreneurs report experiencing racial bias.

e) Over one-third of women entrepreneurs report improvements in their mental health since founding their businesses.

f) The annual growth rate for women-owned businesses in 2019 was 5%, while the average growth rate for U.S.-based businesses was only 1.7%.
g) Women of color founders receive less than 1% of venture capital funds in the U.S. each year.

h) As of 2019, women of color account for 50% of all women-owned businesses.

3. Closing the Gender Gap in Insurance (Rowena Roy, ThinkAdvisor, February 24, 2020)

a) In 2020, insurance companies rely mainly on women for labor. But this statistic is misleading: while women are 85% of claims and processing clerks and 46.5% of sales agents, women are only 11% of executive officer positions, and 19% of board seats. From the time spent in lower level roles, women develop consumer behavior insights, enabling them to launch successful businesses of their own.

b) The opportunity gap is strengthened by “unsupportive cultures and organizational bias.”

c) Only 8% of companies have formal programs to develop strong careers for women when it has been proven that networking and mentorship are powerful ways to create high level opportunities for women in insurance.

a) 75% of women in high ranking positions have a female-dominated inner circle.

b) A neurological reason for the gender disparity (Laura Cullen), “When women befriend other women it releases our oxytocin hormone which calms our stress levels. This same effect doesn’t happen in men when they connect with people.”

5. Challenges Faced by Women Entrepreneurs and Some of the Most Successful Women to Follow (Paula Fernandes and Marisa Sanfilippo, Business News Daily, June 11, 2020)

a) Challenges: Defying social expectations, accessing funding, struggling to be taken seriously, owning your accomplishments, building a support network, balancing business and family life, coping with fear of failure.

6. The Future of InsurTech (Kasi Johnston, Insurance Business America, June 23, 2020))

a) Insurance investment is at an all-time high and it’s not slowing down.

b) “The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that almost anything can be done online, including insurance transactions”

c) The insurance industry must be ready to quickly adapt to new technology and new problems, and continue to innovate and challenge.

7. PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor (PitchBook, July 13, 2020)

a) “The proportion of deals going to companies founded by women is declining in 2020, and overall deal activity for female-founded startups is on pace to fall after three straight annual increases. The median pre-money valuation for startups founded solely by women is at $12 million this year, compared to $33.4 million for companies founded solely by men. After several years of positive momentum—and in a time when diversity is top of mind for many firms and companies—it's disheartening to see this divide continue to widen. I could go on about other thoughts and takeaways from the report, including resilience among nontraditional investors, the divergence of angel and seed deals, and an ongoing biotech boom.”

8. Building Resilience: How to Ensure Women Are Not Left Behind as a Result of COVID-19 (Mary Ellen Iskenderian, Women’s World Banking, April 20, 2020)

a) COVID-19 has revealed the discrepancies of equality around the world. Women, among many others, are disproportionately impacted by global events like COVID-19.

b) Ensure women have equal access to technology, increase women’s access to digital financial services, lessen the impacts of the burden of unpaid care work in women, enable full funcationaliry of government to person accounts for financial health, invest in collecting sex-disaggregated data and improving data quality to inform policies and porducts.