Reflecting on our Women in Insurance awards win and a successful 2020

So, congratulations on being crowned winner of the contribution to inclusion award at this year’s Women in Insurance Awards! How are you feeling?

Over the moon! Everyone on the GIN committee has been working incredibly hard to bring our members support and resources, to act as a wider resource and ‘go to’ place for anyone wanting to network across the insurance industry. We’re a community of like-minded people who are focused on achieving gender inclusion.

Of course we want to give a huge thank you to all our committee members for their time and effort, without whom it simply wouldn’t have been possible to win the 2020 Women In Insurance Award for Contribution to Inclusion award. We are absolutely delighted to receive this award and a huge thank you to our members for attending our events, reading our content, and supporting our activities throughout the year. It means so much to us here at GIN!

Our dedicated committee and exec sponsors are all volunteers from the insurance industry, and it’s their hard work and support that has got us to where we are today

2020 has certainly been a strange year for many people – how have you continued to keep supporting your members?

It has definitely been a strange year, but GIN has given all of us a purpose to continue to help drive positive change across our industry. Our committee is a strong army of volunteers creating all our content and events behind the scenes, allowing us to continue driving change across the industry.

It’s also presented some new opportunities for us - for example switching our events online has allowed us to reach an audience who aren’t based in London, or those who work flexibly. It’s amazing to broaden our scope, so although we definitely see the benefits of face-to-face events and are looking forward to their return, we’re definitely taking the benefits of virtual activities forward.

Aside from this award, what’s been the highlight for GIN this year?

We couldn’t not acknowledge that this has been a huge highlight for us, but there’s also been lots of other brilliant milestones for us this year. The first is seeing our membership grow to over 1,000! We love keeping the conversation around gender balance going with all of you, and it’s so important to keep in touch through all our channels: newsletters, social media, the blog and at our events.

Dive In is always a highlight for us, but this year we sponsored an event on allyship: a verb that crosses boundaries which was a really powerful panel and prompted a great conversation. If 2020 has taught us anything it’s to be bold and have powerful conversations - over 600 attendees came along for this empowering event and everyone took something away from it.

We’re always sharing the highlights and best bits of GIN to our members, so do join the GIN community to get involved in the conversation if you aren’t already a member!

What would be your piece of advice for someone in a junior or middle management role in the industry today?

GIN’s focus has always been supporting junior employees and those in middle management, and we’d say to any one of our members that you should always go for that next career opportunity, believe in yourself and your capability.

For our female members we acknowledge the research that shows most don’t put themselves forward for a role unless they think they are able to perform the role fully, whilst male colleagues will take the chance. So, we say go for it! You are more than capable of that next step up, lead the way and continue to educate and support your peers who will be looking to you as a role model.

For our male members we recognise that there is much pressure in the world at the moment and males tend to find it harder to open up about their feelings, or acknowledge when they’re feeling overwhelmed. We want you to support each other, as well as reaching out to your family, friends and colleagues if you’re finding things tough so you can get the best out of yourself.

At GIN we are a community and we always want to address the key barriers that our members feel they’re facing so do get in touch if there’s any key topics you’d like us to cover.

What are you excited about for the future?

As you can see this year has been a good year for GIN, so thank you all for your continuous support and engagement with our activities over the last 12 months. We’re excited to go bigger and bolder in 2021!

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