Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day, and to mark the occasion we’re bringing you the latest in our special series of the ESG Insider podcast focused on women in leadership. We’re talking to Marita Zuraitis, CEO of Horace Mann, a financial services and insurance company that serves U.S. public educators.

Marita tells us how she handles the unconscious bias she has encountered on her path to the C-suite.

“I can't tell you how many times somebody handed me their coat,” she says. “Now we call it unconscious bias, and we talk about making people aware of their unconscious biases. I didn't have a label for it until a lot of the corporate social responsibility and ESG push that we see today.”

Marita also discusses how her company works to promote diversity, equity and inclusion for its workforce and for its customer base, which is 75% women.

"We work really hard to support our very heavily concentrated female customer base,” she says. "Females in our customer base are often the head of household, often working on and controlling the finances in the household, and many of those people are women of color. So concentrating our efforts on financial wellness and financial planning for our sector was something that we thought we could do to get right to the issue of helping females protect what they have today and secure their long-term financial future.”

Diversity in leadership has received increasing attention in recent years from stakeholders in the sustainability world. Investors have pushed for diversity on company boards and management teams, and in some parts of the world, that push has extended to laws and regulations. But the number of women in top roles remains low. Read recent research from S&P Global on women in leadership here: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/insights/featured/special-editorial/women-ceos-leadership-for-a-diverse-future

And here: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/insights/featured/special-editorial/the-path-to-gender-parity

You can listen to previous episodes in our Women in Leadership series here: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/podcasts/women-in-leadership-seventh-generation-ceo-on-importance-of-being-radically-human-

And here: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/podcasts/women-in-leadership-how-norwegian-industrial-ceo-puts-diversity-on-the-agenda

We'd love to hear from you. To give us feedback on this episode or share ideas for future episodes, please contact hosts Lindsey Hall (lindsey.hall@spglobal.com) and Esther Whieldon (esther.whieldon@spglobal.com).

Photo source: Horace Mann

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