Zurich embraces equity and celebrates contributions by women

Zurich has been celebrating the contributions women have made to American culture, society and the insurance industry during this Women’s History Month — while also fostering dialogue related to gender parity, pay transparency, advancement opportunities, work-life balance and other ongoing challenges facing women in the workplace.

Zurich also highlighted the 2023 campaign theme for International Women’s Day — #EmbraceEquity — throughout the month’s programming and activities, which were developed in collaboration with various Zurich global offices and Zurich North America’s Women’s Innovation Network (WIN) employee resource group.

Dawn Hiestand, Head of Captives at Zurich North America and leader of WIN said the theme resonates with her as encouragement to reflect on the past and find hope in progress for the future. “It is not enough to embrace equality,” she said. “Focusing on equity challenges us to recognize our different circumstances and pushes us to help all to thrive.”

Hiestand also noted that WIN, which was Zurich North America’s first employee resource group and now has 1800 members, supports workforce sustainability and promotes equity through its efforts to cultivate career growth for members. The group’s updated strategy for 2023 focuses on building strategic networking relationships, advancing leadership skills and fostering allyship.

Zurich marked International Women’s Day on March 8 with a panel discussion featuring representatives from across Zurich’s global community, including Laura Lazarczyk, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel at Zurich North America. Lazarczyk opened her remarks with thoughts on the relationship between equality and equity. “To me, equality is a sense of fairness where people of both genders and all races and orientations have what they need to thrive. Equality means all employees are given equal benefits, standards, training and opportunity,” she said. “To have equality, it’s important to understand equity. Equality sets the foundation to create an equal playing field, while equity levels out the playing field and identifies possible disparities.”

Actions to drive progress

Lazarczyk also cited improvements in women’s representation within Zurich North America. At the end of 2022, women made up 51 percent of the overall workforce, 49 percent of technical roles, 49 percent of management roles and 36 percent of leadership roles. Women in senior leadership roles rose to 26 percent from 2021 to 2022 — a four percent rise. “We still have progress to make, but our women representation numbers are at a strong starting place, and we are heading in the right direction,” she said.

Stressing that actions are key to driving progress and maintaining credibility, Lazarczyk offered several examples of how Zurich North America is demonstrating its commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging (DIEB), including:

• Forming an Executive Diversity and Inclusion Council — consisting of senior leaders, representatives from various employee resource groups and external participants from brokers and customers — to guide and ensure accountability on improvements in workforce DIEB
• Communicating performance goals tied to DIEB to underscore the importance of everyone’s role in staying focused on and advancing DIEB
• Performing pay equity analyses to ensure that Zurich employees performing equivalent or similar work are earning equitable salaries, regardless of gender, race and ethnicity
• Engaging with Zurich North America’s 10 employee resource groups focused on fostering belonging and providing insights to the business

WIN also hosted a panel discussion this month highlighting the growing digital gender divide. The Digitalization and Innovation to Promote Gender Parity program focused on the need for inclusive and transformative technology and digital education for a sustainable future. Panelists from Zurich North America and Junior Achievement shared examples of actions that are helping communities at a local, company and global level.