Building Resilience Through Inclusion

Women are key to economic progress. They make between 75 and 85 percent of household purchasing decisions and own one-third of the world’s businesses. Yet, women globally face a variety of barriers to accessing and using financial services, which puts them at an economic disadvantage. Women also face life moments such as motherhood, divorce/widowhood and retirement that can make them particularly economically vulnerable. This panel showed how the private sector can help build resilience throughout women’s lifecycles with access to the right combination of financial and non-financial services, and in providing that, how companies are building their own resilience.

Key Points:

• – Women are not a problem to solve. They are a great asset.
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• – Women are a vital force in the economy. We need to support women for the good of the economy and society – and at times change our systems so they work better for women.
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• – Women are the decision makers of an increasing number of financial and non-financial decisions, and they rank protection as one of the top priorities for their personal and professional lives. Despite this, the Women’s Market for insurance is largely ignored.
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• – If we don’t keep women in mind when building AI, the challenges we face today will just be replicated. This requires more women building AI, increased gender awareness/removing biases, and being smart about designing for women.
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• – While men and women can have the same needs, women often have different requirements. We need to design for them. For example, both need health coverage, but health coverage for women needs to include maternity and protection from specific diseases like breast cancer.
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• – Tackling the Women’s Market is not just about reinventing core products, but also changing the perception around financial and insurance products, customizing the go-to-market approach, customer interactions & services.
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• – From an internal perspective, women must be a priority – targeting gender parity at all levels of the organization and improving gender balance across the salesforce.
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• – Related to gender and women’s empowerment, we urge the G7 to focus on two topics:
  • Longevity: This impacts women greatly as they live longer than men (often outliving their husbands) and are also the primary caregivers of elders.
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  • Technology: This brings many opportunities, but also risks. One risk is the development of a new digital gender gap. Most new technologies are made by men and for men; there is a key imperative to develop inclusive-by-design technology, particularly for women.