It is my pleasure to join you at today’s conference on Corporate Governance, Sustainability, and Diversity. I wish I could be with you in person, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you today, even if virtually.
[current state of gender equality]
The topic of the panel that will follow is Financial Services, Gender & Inclusion, and I am particularly pleased to speak about this to you all, in Athens, where, as you heard throughout the day, important strides are being made in corporate governance and diversity.
The business case for gender equality in general, and in financial services in particular, has never been clearer: it is not only a matter of fundamental fairness. Gender equality is also a crucial driver of business success.
We know that companies with higher gender diversity are more likely to outperform their peers in profitability by up to 25% (McKinsey’s 2019 diversity report). This is not a small margin. Yet despite this, today, women hold less than a quarter of board seats globally (Deloitte Global’s 2024 Women in the Boardroom report).
Looking at the current state of play in Europe, the situation is less bleak than the global average, but the progress is uneven and insufficient: Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin’s research has shown that despite women’s remarkable educational gains – now accounting for 60% of new university graduates in the EU—multiple structural barriers continue to block their advancement to top positions.
Her research shows that stepping back from work to care for family, combined with rigid workplace schedules, creates lasting barriers for women trying to advance to leadership roles. This helps explain women’s persistent under-representation in economic decision-making: especially at the top. Only one in three board members are women. And only 8% of board chairs are women (Consilium). While some countries like France and Norway have achieved nearly equal women’s representation on boards through quota systems, others lag significantly behind.
Increasing women’s participation in the economy and ensuring gender balance in leadership roles are powerful ways to address broader gender gaps in our societies and economies.
The underrepresentation of women has particular significance in our sector. Insurance and pensions, at their core, are about understanding and managing risk for all of society. How can we truly achieve this if our leadership does not reflect the diversity of the people we serve? How can we innovate and adapt to emerging risks if we are missing half the talent pool? The answer is simple – we cannot.
[the importance of diversity in financial services (Invisible women)]
To illustrate the real-world implications of this lack of diversity in financial services, let me share some concrete examples, drawing from Caroline Criado Perez’s groundbreaking work ‘Invisible Women.’ The book shows how data bias against women creates real-world disadvantages that our sector needs to address.
Take automotive safety testing, where crash tests have historically used male-bodied dummies as the standard, despite physical differences between male and female bodies. Studies have found this can lead to women being at higher risk of serious injury in comparable crashes. This is just one instance where incomplete perspectives lead to concrete harm, and potentially mispriced risk in our insurance models.
These biases extend throughout the financial sector and have implications beyond insurance. Traditional credit scoring models, for instance, often fail to account for women’s different career patterns, including breaks for caregiving to children or elderly. AI-powered recruitment tools, trained on historical data which reflects male-dominated workplaces, can perpetuate existing biases in hiring and promotion. Even mobile banking apps have been found to be designed primarily around male usage patterns and preferences.
[Effects of biases on women’s long-term financial security]
These design biases point to a deeper structural problem that manifests in every aspect of women’s financial lives. The historic underrepresentation of women—in the workforce, and in better-paid and leadership positions—has created a cycle of disadvantage that becomes particularly visible when we look at long-term financial security.
Pay gaps and pension gaps compound over time, creating a cascade of financial disadvantages. When women earn less, they save less. When they save less, they invest less. And considering that life expectancy for women is typically higher than men, this creates real financial vulnerability.
Today women in the EU receive pensions nearly 30% smaller than men, increasing their risk of poverty by 35%. This isn’t just a problem for today – it’s creating a legacy of inequality that will echo through generations.
[How AI and automation may disproportionally affect the future of women’s jobs]
As we are working to address these existing gender inequalities, new ones are emerging. Artificial intelligence and automation present both opportunities and risks. While the integration of AI across financial services brings welcome transformation, we must be mindful of its implications for gender equality.
First, there’s the risk of algorithmic bias. As I explained, when AI systems are trained on historical data reflecting decades of gender inequality, they can perpetuate and scale these biases. Without careful attention to debiasing both data and algorithms, we risk automating historical patterns of discrimination.
Second, AI and automation are fundamentally reshaping the way we work. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, women are overrepresented in many roles most likely to be automated. In financial services, we’re seeing this impact in positions where women have traditionally been well-represented: bank tellers, claims processing specialists, customer service representatives, and accounting functions.
This is worrying because, as Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin has demonstrated, even when we compare men and women in the exact same professions, with the same qualifications and experience, a significant pay gap already persists. This means women are at a great disadvantage: they are paid less in their current roles, are more likely to face automation-driven displacement, and often end up with lower earnings when transitioning to new jobs.
Meanwhile, the growth areas are in tech-focused roles like data science, digital product development, and AI governance – areas where women are historically underrepresented. This isn’t just about teaching current skills; it’s about fundamental transformation of career paths. Without proactive measures to support reskilling and create inclusive career paths, we risk seeing a disproportionate displacement of women from our sector.
Today, globally, women represent just 30% of the AI and data workforce, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 report. This underrepresentation has implications. The developers, entrepreneurs, and professionals shaping AI technology stand to benefit from this transformation, both financially and in their influence over how these technologies evolve. If women remain underrepresented in these roles, we risk a future where the economic benefits of AI innovation flow disproportionately to men, potentially widening rather than narrowing the gender wealth gap.
This is why ensuring women’s active participation in the AI necessary. Yes, it is about fairness, but it is also about access to economic opportunity and about being there to shape the future of technology itself.
[legislative developments to advance gender diversity in Europe]
There is a growing recognition of these challenges, and we are seeing action: The regulatory environment in the EU is advancing to promote gender equality. The EU’s Women on Boards Directive, mandating 40% of non-executive director positions to be held by women by 2026, marks a milestone. Core policies like the Equal Pay Directive remain important, as the gender pay gap continues to feed into the pension gap, as I said earlier.
At EIOPA, we are also taking concrete steps to support this change.
First, we advocate for wider implementation of pension dashboards and tracking tools to effectively monitor the pension gaps, also in view of addressing gender inequality.
In April 2022, I sent a letter to the co-legislators, arguing for further promoting diversity of management bodies in insurance and pensions. I emphasized the opportunity to include such provisions in the Solvency II and IORPs II reviews.
Progress is already visible in our regulatory framework. The political agreement on the Solvency II review now requires insurance and reinsurance undertakings to implement diversity policies for their administrative, management, and supervisory bodies, including specific quantitative objectives for gender balance. EIOPA is currently developing guidelines on these diversity requirements through an ongoing public consultation.
Looking ahead, I want to highlight three key measures that can reduce gender disparity in the financial services sector:
First, financial institutions must treat diversity as a core governance issue. This means setting clear targets, measuring progress, and holding leadership accountable for results.
Second, as insurance and pensions, and the broader financial sectors digitize, we will need to upskill and reskill, and as we do this, we need to pay attention to ensuring women are not left behind.
Finally, incorporating diverse perspectives in product design and risk assessment will lead to better outcomes for all customers.
If we are serious about achieving greater progress, and not taking decades to do so, we will all need to do our part. We need regulators, industry leaders, and stakeholders to prioritize gender diversity and inclusion in order to create lasting change. This isn’t just about meeting quotas or ticking boxes – it’s about building a financial services sector that truly serves everyone.
Let me close with this thought: Our financial sector must help address the defining challenges of our time: financing the transition to a low-carbon economy, ensuring retirement security for aging populations, building infrastructure resilient to climate impacts, and managing emerging health and technological risks. Alongside these challenges, as a society we must tackle gender imbalances across our educational and professional life. The aim should not be to get more women into leadership, but to ensure balanced representation at every level—and to ensure that it stays that way. Here I refer back to the number of 60% I mentioned at the start of my speech. 60% or women now in university. Clearly an imbalance that we need to recognise and act upon to insure boys have equal opportunity to reach higher education. Not by stopping what we do by women, but to add actions that address this issue for men. Maybe not easy, these topics are complex, interconnected challenges, but they are urgent.
The future of financial services will be defined by how well we adapt to these challenges.
To develop effective solutions under these pressures, to make better decisions, we need teams that reflect the full spectrum of diversity: across gender, age, cultural background, life experience, and ways of thinking. Diversity in all its forms is not just a nice-to-have. It is necessary for building the resilient, innovative, and trustworthy financial sectors.
EIOPA, and I myself personally, look forward to doing our part to get us all closer to this reality. Thank you for your attention.