Our focus on gender diversity began in 2017 with a leadership competencies course facilitated by McKinsey & Co including a unit called “unlocking the potential of women”. We were already curious about the evolution of gender diversity globally at this time. The course not only catered for women leaders but for male group managers, to give them an understanding of why it is essential to put gender diversity front and centre.

This led us to formulate a basic gender leadership pipeline. We did this not with a view to publishing it but simply to see what it might look like. It was an eye-opening exercise. Also around this time, I had a personal experience in the workplace that made me realise nothing would change while we had unconscious bias in the organisation.

We introduced unconscious bias training, but we knew we needed to do something more – and we needed a champion of change to make it happen. I decided to take up this opportunity.

It has been a gradual evolution ever since. This kind of change doesn’t happen overnight. I needed to add more voices to the cause. ‘Building the choir’ also meant more female leaders with strong voices who were prepared to start to challenge themselves.

Another project we have introduced is our women in leadership programme, which is externally facilitated twice a year. This enabled us to have some very honest conversations with women leaders, to start to recognise things like imposter syndrome and to identify barriers we were putting in our own way. We started to hear more confident voices as a result.

At the same time, a lot of information has been circulating outside the organisation about the importance of diversity as a driver of change. As we emerged from COVID-19, we introduced gender-linked KPIs to group managers and we reported on them to each other – which we continue to do today, on a monthly basis.

We highlighted two issues in achieving a better gender balance. The first was meeting the gender diversity requirement and the other was identifying where we had no or little male representation.

The real breakthrough came when we started to work with our own LGBTQIA+ affinity group, Pride Network. By raising awareness and understanding – through the network’s authentic engagement with the business and hearing stories the network was prepared to tell – we started to realise we had some great people already in our business to assist with forging change.

On reflection, my expectation was that gender diversity would be the easiest challenge to overcome. However, getting the Pride Network on board helped our community to recognise their own prejudices, with the knock-on effect of bringing a wider range of opportunities into our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work. I am very grateful for what the Pride Network has done to create a real shift and cultural momentum in the Liberty business.

It wasn’t a catalyst, but it had a role. We promoted the work from our Pride Network during COVID-19 when our people were mostly working at home – they were able to access the online programme in a gentle, confidential way.

This was when we introduced pronouns into the organisation, and it delivered a feeling of safety. Pride Network changed the shape of the organisation, which in turn supported the shaping of everything else in relation to women and gender diversity.

We created the “mens’ cuppa” in response to curiosity about the women in leadership programme. Mens’ cuppa helps male leaders understand female leaders by building a bridge between what might previously been unknown work, to help them understand all work is good work, as well as the issues women are clouded with that can sometimes hinder their feeling of value and their career aspirations.

Over the last few years, we introduced our Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), and we are currently developing our Innovate RAP. As we operate in Australia and New Zealand, we are focused on initiatives and celebrations of First Nations and Māori people.

Last year, we began a neurodiversity channel – offering neurodiversity training specifically to group managers and senior leaders first, and then widened to offer all our leaders neurodiversity training. The third phase introduced this training across the business so it is now available to all Liberty colleagues.

We also run cultural awareness training for our multiculturally diverse workforce and customer base. We run internal World Expo events for staff, highlighting the kaleidoscope of cultures and beliefs within our community. In March, we ran World Expo for Culture and it is World Expo for Religion in October.

We offer our employees the opportunity to present their faith and cultural heritage to their colleagues, explaining how these help shape who they are and why they are important. We are also cognisant of accessibility to these materials, and therefore record all presentations and make them available to employees. We have built quite a robust library of relevant presentations.

Currently, we are working to introduce physical-disabilities-inclusive initiatives. We plan to introduce a programme for people of colour when we are comfortable that we can create momentum for this in a safe way, rather than being a tick the box exercise.

We are social beings. We talk about the values of our business but ultimately what we are striving for is belonging. To create a culture of belonging we have to speak to everybody, remembering that no two people are the same. We need to think about the social mechanisms we can use to help, support and provide a safe work environment – and to me, ultimately, this is DEI. If DEI is working as it should, we will have created a culture of belonging.

I commend WGEA for bringing this transparency. It was a very positive step to make these data public, even though I am highly disappointed by our result. I have worked at Liberty for 23 years and over this time conscious bias is now barely present. We began as a start-up and we were naturally attracting more male employees, some of whom are still in our business – and such tenure and loyalty is reflected in remuneration.

However, the gender pay gap is calculated as a median average – so we have a call to action to increase the number of women in our most senior leadership roles in order to reduce the gap.

We attract many female graduates and women are coming into our business in more junior roles. We hope that with supportive policies – like parental and reproductive leave – female staff will increase their longevity of tenure in the business and naturally reduce the gender pay gap.

Informally we have been doing the work but we didn’t formalise it, so we were very surprised that it was included in the report. We now have a formalised policy that we will report on in future.

It is very challenging in our New Zealand business as most New Zealanders want to travel. We have even tried recruiting from Australia, but we find that people who work in New Zealand financial services believe their opportunity for growth and development is to work in larger, offshore markets.

In Australia, we find the challenge less acute. We have quite a large cohort of men and women that have celebrated 20 years with the Liberty business, including an almost equal gender split in the 5-10-year tenure mark [see table].

There are two ways. One would be when I have people in their 50s telling me they feel like they are a better person because of the learning and education they have been able to access through work. There are many awards but it’s a different story when employees thank you for enabling them in various ways in the workplace.

The other way is for Liberty to be known as an employer of social conscience, where staff would be proud for their children and loved ones to be employed. We want our staff to have the opportunity to thrive, to be truly happy and to be their authentic and emergent selves.

A thriving organisation can achieve just about anything. We know this narrative because it comes from case studies and data. If we can provide a place of belonging where no-one wants to work anywhere else because they are realising their potential, that’s when I’ll know we’ve got there.

“We are social beings. We talk about the values of our business but ultimately what we are striving for is belonging. To create a culture of belonging we have to speak to everybody, remembering that no two people are the same.”