Insurance is a relationship business. It always has been. The ability to read a room, build trust quickly and show up as yourself, in a client meeting, across an underwriting box, at a broking lunch, is not a soft skill in this industry. It is the job.
Which makes a particular question worth asking: what does it cost, professionally and personally, to manage a parallel identity at work? According to LINK, the LGBTQ+ Insurance Network, nearly one in four LGBTQ+ professionals in the UK insurance industry has experienced or witnessed workplace bullying, almost double the figure recorded just five years ago. The industry has changed, and the question is whether it has changed enough.
Insurance Business UK spoke with three LGBTQ+ professionals who have built significant careers across the market. Their accounts are candid, and the picture they paint is more complicated than the rainbow logos of June suggest.
Jason Groves (pictured top, left), international director of external affairs & media relations at Marsh, joined the industry in 1999. He is specific about what those early years required, a running mental audit of who knew he was gay and who did not, adjusted constantly, client by client, contact by contact.
“Insurance is very much a people industry,” he said. "There was definitely a perception in the late 1990s that it could harm your career, your relationships and your potential future employment if you came out."
The practical consequence, he said, was a kind of professional contraction. "I became more formal, more guarded. It created a barrier that people who weren't in that situation simply didn't have." In a market where informal relationships, conference conversations and client lunches often shape business, that barrier carries a real professional cost.
John McNamara (pictured top, right), a senior personal insurance leader based in Dublin who sits on the advisory council of LINK, frames the same experience in terms his industry peers will recognise. "If you decide to come out, you do it repeatedly. You build a very clear and keen sense of the environment in which you might do it. That takes energy, a lot of thought, and these are considerations that if you're not in that position, you simply don't have to think about."
He goes further, connecting the personal to the commercial. "The more authentic you are, the more engaged and impactful you can be with your customers," he said. "The better insurance businesses are those closest to their customers, understanding what modern families look like, understanding the environments people operate in."
An industry that prizes authenticity as a commercial asset has a particular stake in making authenticity safe for its own people.
Marie-Hélène Tyack (pictured top, center), head of global inclusion, wellbeing & volunteering at Allianz Commercial in Paris, a senior advisory board member of LINK and founder of Lesbian History Day, brings both personal experience and data to the conversation.
LINK's UK insurance industry survey, published in May 2026, found that 23% of LGBTQ+ respondents had experienced or witnessed workplace bullying, up from 12.6% in 2021. More than half said their organisation lacked visible LGBTQ+ role models. "From just over one in ten to almost one in four, in five years," Tyack said. "And people ask why this work still matters."
She identifies a dimension of the inclusion debate that rarely surfaces in industry coverage, the specific challenge facing queer women. "People talk about the double glass ceiling," she said. "As a woman, you already have one above your head. Do you want to add another layer by being out?" The effect is measurable. LGBTQ+ employee resource groups across the market have traditionally skewed male, she argues, shaping who feels visible and who does not.
Before joining Allianz approximately ten years ago, Tyack worked for an organisation in Paris where she was closeted, and where, she later discovered, a colleague had outed her before she even started. “People knew I was lying, and I spent months lying.” Her decision from that point on was absolute: never again.
On what changes culture, all three agree, and all are equally clear about what does not.
"Tone from the top," said McNamara. "Explicit executive support. Say it, say why it matters to you, tell your personal experience. If people hear why those at the top say it's important, it permeates through an organisation. What impacts people in an insurance business is what happens every single day of the year, not a month of it."
Tyack is sharper still on the gap between corporate Pride and genuine commitment. “By all means, have your pride cupcakes and change your logo,” she said. “But what happens once the cupcake has gone stale?” She has noticed fewer rainbow logos this year and sees that as evidence that some corporate commitments were never as deep as they appeared.
Groves, who chaired the Dive In Festival for eight years, credits the annual event, launched in 2015 by Inclusion@Lloyd's, with giving "permission for people to talk about a whole range of issues that were previously just not spoken about." With Lloyd's currently consulting on the festival's future format, he is watching the outcome carefully.
His message to young LGBTQ+ professionals entering the market is direct. "I still speak to people who say, I think I'm the only one in my team. How they're treated in those early days makes such a difference to how young LGTBQ+ professionals integrate and how quickly they advance their careers."
McNamara's warning is harder still. "A lot of us thought this was a one-way agenda. That has proven not to be the case. Don't think things can't go backwards. They can."
For an industry built on trust, relationships and understanding people, the experiences these three describe are not simply questions of workplace culture. They also shape how confidently professionals build careers, develop client relationships and contribute to the business.
Tyack closes with the image that runs beneath the whole conversation, the person the industry tends not to see, the one for whom a logo in June changes nothing and a quiet act of recognition on an ordinary day changes everything. "Change doesn't always look like a revolution," she said. "Sometimes it looks like a conversation. Sometimes it looks like a hand on someone's shoulder saying, I see you."
That is what inclusion looks like in practice. Not in June. On a cold Tuesday in November.
