'Professional loneliness': A woman is disrupting the insurance sector

A priest told Sophia Yen to go for the money—and so she did. But along the way, Yen grew into something prodigious: a formidable disruptor in industries not used to women in power.

At the time, Yen was a new graduate of Boston College. She had desired a life of service with a nonprofit after attending the Catholic school. But with high honors in computer science and finance, corporate America came calling.

Her mentor told her to accept the opportunity, and she listened.

In the two decades that followed, Yen earned an MBA from Columbia Business School. She rose to C-suites across three industries: consulting, insurance and finance—most recently as principal of Ernst & Young, where she serves as the firm’s insurance strategy and innovation leader. She held executive leadership positions, beginning in her early 20s; oversaw a portfolio of more than $2.5 billion for Swiss Reinsurance Co. Ltd.; and helped UBS Investment Bank shave $30 million in costs.

She also made a dangerous choice.

In industries where successful women often mute feminine traits, or risk being assigned “office housework,” Yen’s colleagues describe her as “nurturing” and “passionate.”

“Protection and creation are visceral to me,” she said. “What I say to others is what I say to myself: Do the best you can, and the name of the game is survival. If you don’t survive … it doesn’t matter how many great ideas you have. It doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to be there to share them.”

‘We start to lose women’

Yen’s chances of survival once seemed slim.

“The thing I struggled with, especially early in my career, was the incredible feeling of professional loneliness,” she said.

At Boston College, Yen was the only woman in her computer science courses, and one of a handful in finance classes during the mid- to late ’90s. Later, at offices in the World Trade Center, she would look across trading floors, and see only men, many of whom she said oscillated between sexual advances and being “blatantly unwelcoming.”

“There was not even a women’s bathroom,” she said.

In meetings, the CEO would praise others for programs Yen had coded. And when Yen would try to contribute to conversations, men often talked over her.

“It doesn’t matter what I said, there was a critic. People of color and women don’t get the airtime that we should,” she said. “We often feel that we are alone.”

Many minorities change direction as a result.

In finance and insurance, for instance, the lower ranks are almost evenly split between men and women. But in the C-suites, women account for only 18% of the top positions, according to McKinsey & Co.’s 2018 and 2019 studies. In insurance, a study of 1,150 companies across the globe by management consulting company Mercer found that 41% reported a lack of racial diversity, while 15% felt gender diversity was lacking.

Related: Here’s how insurance companies can achieve real results on diversity

The same is true in consulting.

“The insurance industry starts out balanced in hiring a diverse workforce, yet we start to lose women in the senior management ranks,” said Ed Majkowski, Ernst & Young insurance sector leader for the Americas. “The historical journey has been long for the male-dominated sector. In many markets, very few women make it to the senior executive ranks. … Sophia’s helping to change that.”

Now, Yen works with consulting clients to create agendas that draw insight from all team members—not just the ones who dominate rooms. She believes that women and other minorities—often used to living in cultures not focused on them—are just what insurance and financial services providers need to help them understand and reverse growing customer dissatisfaction.

“It kills me that we hold meetings with all that diversity of thought, and the same handful of people talk again and again,” Yen said. “And then we wonder why our industry struggles. Customer sentiment is low, second to the bottom. The only industry we are beating is cable. And that’s not an accomplishment.”

But once, Yen was not so sure about her place in the business. Back then, she would remove herself from her workspace to walk into the fresh air, and recharge.

“Truthfully I hated every day of it,” she said. “I thought, ‘What am I doing?’”

But then, a breakthrough: At Swiss Re she developed a tool to calculate profitability based on multiple assumptions, allowing teammates to make real-time projections that steered decisions across the Americas.

“It was something she took upon herself to develop,” said then-boss Patrick Mailloux, now chief underwriting officer and global product leader of casualty international at AIG Inc. “As soon as she started in the role, it became very clear very quickly that she could operate at the highest level.”

‘Long game’

And now Yen is teaching other women to do what she has mastered: balancing authenticity and power.

“We’re a lot better than that trading floor that I started on, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be. This is a long game. We’re not sprinting. This is a marathon,” she said. “I don’t know why we are still debating this, when we know the business case is so strong.”

But it’s more than a professional mission.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Yen saw her mother—a teacher with a graduate degree—work for $35 a week in a U.S. department store. Her family had fled their country with nothing to settle in South India, before moving to New York. It taught her resilience and courage.

“The thing I like most about Sophia is although … she’s climbed to very senior levels of organizations, she’s done it very much as a woman,” Mailloux said. “Sophia can go toe to toe with the very best of them, while letting us have the benefit of the fact that she is a woman.”

Barbara Bufkin noticed this too when she first met Yen as part of a group planning a conference on inclusion in the insurance industry. She saw in Yen a professional with high EQ and IQ, who was skilled at executing projects, and raising talent to improve company performance.

The group had needed a keynote speaker, and Bufkin knew who could deliver the most powerful presentation.

“She is a woman who at a very young age has achieved a lot of success. … She’s true to herself,” said Bufkin, senior adviser at AmWINS Access Insurance Services.

What happened next propelled Yen into the spotlight across her industry, and established her in a national arena as a champion for women who would follow in her footsteps.

“Just sitting next to her, watching her, listening to her, I knew that we needed her on stage,” Bufkin said. “I said, ‘Sophia, how about you?’ … She brought the house down.”

Samantha Joseph is co-head of the Litigation Desk in ALM’s global newsroom. Grad school: Newhouse Syracuse. Contact: sjoseph@alm.com. On Twitter: @SjosephWriter