The Intersection: How Actuaries Can and Should be Empowered to Move the Needle on Equity
Disclaimer: the opinions expressed by the author of this article don't necessarily represent the opinions of NAWA as an organization.
Does anyone else feel like 2020 was a whole #mood that changed the entire trajectory of their life? If I rewind to where I was sitting exactly three years ago, it’s hard to even recognize the person that I was, sitting at my makeshift home desk that was supposed to only need to suffice for a two week stay-at-home order, in a different city, working at a different company, even with a different marital status. What has transpired since then is nothing short of a complete transformation, from the person who I was, obsessively focused on my next professional goal or personal milestone, to the 2023 version of myself who is my own boss, surrounded by love and support, obsessively focused on harnessing the superpowers that make me who I am today, and using them for good. Something had to come of the swirl of grief of the loss that we as a society have experienced, gratitude for my own health, and reflection on the life that I had vs. the life that I wanted.
Here we are three years later, three years which included a move to Minnesota, a wedding, adding a second dog to our family, and flipping my career upside-down. Late 2020, I decided to pour my life savings, all the social capital and goodwill I had built up, and every waking hour over the subsequent two years to build a company that consistently asks “why not?”. I was determined to build a place that bets our money on our people, pouring our resources into making them feel valued and supported, while doing work that was both engaging and mission-driven.
Athena Actuarial Consulting is a woman-owned consulting firm focused on mitigating risk and identifying opportunity in the way that humans are cared for, compensated, benefitted, and incentivized through actuarial services, data analytics and people-centered strategies. Our mission-driven approach to empowering our employees to bring their best, whole self to each project translates to innovative and holistic solutions for our clients and their covered populations. Whether it's a fellow consulting firm, a community-based healthcare program or an employer-sponsored fund, we approach each ask from our clients with the true client in mind - the ultimate beneficiaries of the program we're supporting and their families. Our clients rely on our sensitivity to their needs, team-player mentality, and "tell it like it is" attitude to have the data and the confidence to enact change within their own organizations; we are proud to support them as a collaborative, empathetic, and focused extension of their team every day.
Every night as I wrap up work, which is earlier and earlier these days as work-life balance is beginning to feel within reach, I reflect on how my current role as CEO of Athena is a position which I feel uniquely qualified to fulfill. Each day is a rollercoaster of challenges, both personally and professionally, and I have never felt that my heart, my head and my gut were more aligned. Better yet, concurrent with the exponential growth that we experienced in 2022, growing from 1.5 employees to 24, I have been connected with the most amazing, like-minded women who have embarked on a similar path, including the fellow Co-Founders of NAWA. It seems that something was sparked during those lonely days in quarantine, and we all believed that there just had to be something different…something better…out there for ourselves and our families.
Each March, we celebrate Women’s History Month. This month is a great time to reflect on how far we’ve come, to celebrate successful women breaking barriers and glass ceilings. It’s also a time to examine how far we still have to go until we reach parity. Sitting here in 2023, women are still earning just 82 cents for every dollar that a man earns, dropped from 83 cents for every dollar in 2022 (Gender Pay Gap Statistics in 2023, Forbes). That figure drops to 58 cents for every dollar when comparing women of color to non-Hispanic white men. Beyond compensation, more and more research has been pushed out around health equity and wealth equity – revealing that this gap expands beyond base salary, it extends into the education, utilization and maximization of employer-sponsored benefits. As a health or pension actuary, never before has it been easier to tie your purpose to your professional experience. As experts in these employer-sponsored benefits, we are already in the rooms where these conversations around equity should be happening. If they aren’t top of mind for you or your employer, whether you’re on the insurance side, the consulting side, or in industry, I would seriously question that organization’s on-paper commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. We have the ability to infuse purpose into the work we’re doing every day by stepping back, looking at the big picture, and viewing our work through this lens of identifying areas where privilege and access to opportunity may be driving inequity.
My question for you, is what are you going to do about it? Are you overwhelmed, or even paralyzed when considering how we can disrupt systems that have been in place for decades, or even centuries? Here are my recommendations:
Start small, read up on the way in which equity intersects with the work that you’re doing and what you can be doing to encourage decision-makers to infuse this into the conversation.
·Educate yourself on how to get comfortable having the difficult conversations, because I can promise that anything that moves the needle is going to come with resistance.
Surround yourself with people who will pick you up when faced with adversity. People in powerful positions have a decision to make when they arrive there – make the path more accessible for people who look different from them, or, do nothing and allow the inequities of the system to continue to be affirmed and re-affirmed. My wish for you is that you will cross paths more frequently with the latter than the former, but prepare yourself for both scenarios by having your core group of “trouble-makers” to remind you why you’re sticking your neck out.
Here at Athena, equity is embedded in all elements of our internal operations and how we approach our client engagements. We are working hard to both support employers working to make equity a priority through our pay equity work, in additional to developing assets that can be provided to the general public to arm them with the knowledge they need to advocate for themselves and others. The public report we are most proud of is Athena’s Pay Equity Report, which is available on our website here. Even though it was published in 2022, the key takeaways remain valuable. As a special benefit to NAWA members, and for reading this far into this article, I’d love to personally extend the offer to make this report available for free.
Interested in seeing some of the work that we’re doing at Athena to start these conversations around compensation, healthcare, and retirement? Check out some of our related work.
Equity in the Workplace , by Lauren Holec
Perks of a Pay Equity Assessment, by Lauren Holec
Humanizing Healthcare: Is the System Making Strides, by Patsy Freeland and Paula Villafane
Humanizing Healthcare: Mental Health Parity for Non-Healthcare Professionals, by Veronica Fontama
Humanizing Healthcare: Benefit Equity Audits, by Paula Villafane
Equity & Total Rewards, a panel with Adrienne (Ostroff) Lieberthal, Lauren Holec and Paula Villafane, recording will be made available afterwards
About Adrienne
Adrienne founded ATHENA in 2020 after a decade of experience consulting large pension and benefit programs across sectors, industries and geographies at two large consulting firms. She is passionate about creating an authentic and inclusive environment for her team to bring their full self to work, each and every day. In addition to her “day job” as CEO and Founder of ATHENA, Adrienne is a frequent Board member and volunteer across the actuarial profession, with a mix of technical roles specializing in the future outlook of U.S. mortality and leadership roles in organizations dedicated to empowering women in the actuarial profession. She is one of the Co-Founders of the Network of Actuarial Women and Allies (NAWA), which brings together her passions and expertise to build programs that attract, develop and aspire women who work as actuaries across insurance and consulting.
Outside of starting her own business, Adrienne enjoys doing anything outside – hiking, skiing, kayaking – especially where she is alongside her two dogs, Rocky and Shelby, and her partner, Josh.