The female CEO of insurance company Aviva has said that senior white male recruits must get the final sign off by herself, as part of the firm’s aims to improve diversity.
Amanda Blanc, who became the company’s first female CEO in 2020, has brought in the policy in order to eliminate sexism in the financial services industry.
Speaking to a parliamentary committee, she said that “there is no non-diverse hire at Aviva without it being signed off by me and the chief people officer”.
“Not because I don’t trust my team but [because] I want to make sure that the process followed for that recruitment has been diverse, has been properly done and is not just a phone call to a mate saying, ‘would you like a job, pop up and we’ll fix it up for you’,” she said at the Sexism in the City inquiry yesterday.
Blanc became CEO in 2020
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Her comments only apply to senior staff at Aviva, which has a workforce of 22,000.
Explaining her role in signing off senior hirings, she said: “The scope of the charter is to get more women into senior management roles.”
“My belief is if you have more women in senior management roles, this behaviour will go away.”
She was speaking to the committee as part of its third public hearing of whether sexism had improved in London since 2018, when the last investigation was held.
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It was launched after an influx of accusations of sexual misconduct shook the business industry, including scandals at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and allegations against Brexit donor and hedge-fund manager Crispin Odey.
Blanc told the Treasury Select Committee that the financial services industry is rife with harassment, more so than any other business sector.
She told MPs that while she had some “very positive experiences” in the sector, “many women do not”.
The Aviva CEO said she had spoken to women who had written to her ahead of the hearing.
She said they shared with her “absolutely appalling” stories of harassment, including unwanted sexual advances, being followed into hotel rooms, or being told their pregnancies were “inconvenient” for the firm.
Her comments only apply to senior staff at Aviva, which has a workforce of 22,000
Getty
Blanc told MPs: “Every individual firm has to be accountable for any allegations such as this, and the women in the firm have to know that there is a process for speaking up; that that process will be acted on; that everything will be investigated; and that the person who did the bad leaves the organisation, not the women.”
“And we have had experiences like that at Aviva, where the woman has stayed and man has gone,” she added.
Politicians were “extremely shocked” by the hearing’s testimonies, with Dame Angela Eagle saying that she was shocked to hear about a “series of well-known bad apples that nobody ever does anything about”.
The CEO has often spoken out about the sexism that she has faced during her career.
Last year at the firm’s annual general meeting, Blanc was told she was “not the man for the job” and was asked whether she should be “wearing trousers”.
She slammed the comments as “unacceptable behaviour”, which she says has become more frequent and obvious the higher the career ladder she has climbed.
“Perpetrators of predatory behaviour needed to leave the business”, she said.