Aviva CEO tells of shock at sexist remarks from shareholders at AGM

theguardian.com:

The chief executive of Aviva, Amanda Blanc, has told of her shock at being on the receiving end of misogynistic comments at the insurer’s annual meeting last week, saying the incident could prompt a wider rethink on how boards interact with shareholders in future.

Blanc was the target of sexist remarks from individual shareholders at the Aviva AGM in London, with comments from the floor that she was “not the man for the job” and that she should be “wearing trousers”. The chair of the insurer, Mike Craston responded to the remarks, saying he was “flabbergasted”.

The following day, Blanc, who has held a number of senior roles in insurance over 30 years, warned that sexism in the finance industry was increasing. She wrote on the networking site LinkedIn: “The more senior the role I have taken, the more overt the unacceptable behaviour.”

Blanc, who is the first female chief executive of Aviva and is the government’s women in finance champion, told the Guardian: “It’s really important that investors get to grill the Aviva board on decisions they’ve taken or the way the organisation is being run. What’s clearly not acceptable is some of the comments.”

She added: “I’m sure there are many boards preparing for their AGM thinking about how they might deal with that. We prepare a lot of things for all the business meetings that we do, including our AGM. We did not prepare for misogynistic comments. We just didn’t. In 2022, in that sort of forum, you would not have expected that.”

Blanc said she had received many private messages of support from male and female FTSE chief executives and chairs, some of whom had experienced sexism themselves.

Her LinkedIn post had received 1.6m views and 825 comments the last time she looked, “from all