Female Life Agents Wanted

The fact that so few young people are entering life insurance is already a concern to the industry, whose average agent is 57 years old. Another issue, however, is that that 57-year-old is, in the great majority of cases, a man.

Only a third of new life insurance agent recruits are women, a figure that major firms are desperate to change, according to a report by Falls Church, Virginia-based GAMA International, a nonprofit association for the insurance and financial services industry.

Getting people to buy life insurance policies isn’t easy, and no doubt some customers would respond better to women than men. Workplaces that are homogenous, whether by gender, race or ethnicity, tend to acquire large blind spots in their marketing efforts because of a lack of different cultural perspectives among employees.

Granted, life insurance isn’t nearly as male-dominated as some other professions. A study by Catalyst found that women make up only 8.9 percent of the workforce in construction, for instance. The same study found they account for 22 percent of employees in utilities.   

In fact, life insurance sales does not appear to be more male-dominated than other types of sales. According to federal data, only 26 sales supervisor positions in nonretail industries were women in 2014. In the upper echelons of sales, the numbers are likely even worse: A survey of 150 large Silicon Valley companies found that less that 12 percent of sales executives were women.

The life insurance industry has undergone a number of major shifts as a result of the internet. As Jeff Root wrote in LifeHealthPro two years ago, the old adage that “life insurance is sold, not bought” does not ring as true in an era in which many customers simply go online themselves and buy an insurance policy without ever interacting with an agent.

In 2013, only 50 percent of life insurance policies involved a face-to-face interaction with an agent, down from 80 percent in 1996.