How Aviva is working to create an environment where women are empowered to pursue extraordinary careers

From a young school age, Shefali Roy had always gravitated towards economics. This pull eventually led her to study Economics at RMIT University, University of Oxford, and The London School of Economics and Political Science, which naturally steered her into the finance industry post-graduation. As part of a university program, Shefali began working for HSBC with their Asset Management Team in Melbourne, Australia and spent a total of four years with the firm while she was learning the ropes. With a desire to have a hand in several aspects of a business rather than a siloed workstream, Shefali began to explore other opportunities in the finance world and eventually landed in the insurance field at Aviva where she worked on the Compliance Team. At the time in 2003, Aviva had a business called Navigator, which was a platform services business that offered multi-fund platforms for financial services and financial planning, whether it was insurance, asset management or back-office functions, it gave Shefali new exposure to the multi-functions of financial services.

Learning from Empathetic Leadership

Shefali credits her former Aviva manager, Michelle, for making her experience at the firm so enjoyable. “She was such a great empathetic, very trustworthy, very respectful manager and leader,” says Shefali. “She was open and transparent and everything you really want in a manager – someone who is going to teach you and help you learn.”

At the time, Shefali was still early in her career and admired Michelle’s ability to lead by example. “She also had this lovely way of teaching, even by being critical, but teaching in a really good way. So if you were a young professional and up and coming, it’s managers and leaders like that who are very much happy to mentor you and advise you, and take you under their wings to show you how to do things in the right way. And she was that for me. It was really fabulous to work for someone like that.”

Since leaving Aviva, Shefali has spent her career working in Compliance and Regulatory Affairs in part because it interfaces with every team within a company, which has truly allowed her to learn the ins and outs of a business and how it operates. While many people may think of Compliance Teams as prohibitors, a good one enables the business to grow and thrive by taking calculated risks.

“Good compliance teams actually enable teams and are risk-takers who help businesses grow, earn revenue, and are very commercial. My experience has always been that lens because I had great managers and great people around me who taught me that.”

Advice to Other Entrepreneurs

Shefali believes that in the market of venture, good product and good ideas will always get funding. “I think the harder bit for women-founded teams is that the lens of investing is so skewed to males that most of the time it’s not the product that’s the issue, it’s actually just getting in front of people and saying ‘hey this is the product.’ And that’s the hard part and the access gap that I think most women founders are finding all across the world.”

Shefali emphasizes how most investors across the world are male, and more specifically male and white. “We have a top of funnel problem I would say, and the reason most women-founded teams are not getting seen is because the people who are looking at them don’t look like them,” says Shefali. “So you have inherent and unconscious bias and you default as humans to investing in what you know, in working with what you know, and also therefore in who you know.”

Shefali believes that one of the critical ways to fix this gap is by bringing more investors who are women into the investing space. With the current progress happening, she expects to see this trend continue over the next five to six years.

“Women are already in venture capital, they’re not the ones writing checks because they’re not in that seniority yet, but they are in the industry growing their experience and their portfolio so that in five to six years’ time they get promoted to partner of their venture firms where they can make investment decisions,” says Shefali. “At the moment in 2022, those statistics are horribly skewed in the other way so it’s going to take some time to change the lens and metric. Once you see more women coming into the market, you’re then going to see more women investments because it’s just human nature as we tend to invest in what we know and who we know and that’s going to take time.”

To make such a change, Shefali urges that there needs to be a collaborative effort and momentum of women across the world who do think this is important and can come together to look at the investment landscape.

“I loved leaders who didn’t just accept the status quo and didn’t just accept ‘well this is the way it has always been’ because those never change the planet. Those sorts of leaders male or female never change the planet…I’ve always been inspired by leaders who thought ‘well this is great for me but it could be better for those coming behind me so let me shake it up now.’ It must get better for everyone coming behind me and building their careers.”

Giving Back to Empower Women and Young Girls

Shefali has been a board member and advisor for several organizations working to uplift women in technology and STEM. More recently she was a board member for Ada’s List, a women’s technology network where she helped the organization think about how to scale and grow. Ada’s List is a free network for women and non-binary people who work in tech and since its founding, has grown to over 8,000 members organically. It was started at a time when there were few women in tech with the sole purpose of building community and a sense of belonging. It is a visibility platform and marketplace designed to help members collaborate and progress professionally.

“It ended up being a network of women who were able to find a safe space to talk about some of the serious topics that we’ve had over the last couple of years in technology, whether that was discrimination, gender parity, pay parity, having conversations about what to do in the event of things going wrong in an organization or how to get help.”

In addition to Ada’s List, Shefali served as an advisor for Erase All Kittens (E.A.K.), which was founded by two women. Erase All Kittens is an online game that introduces children, especially girls, to computational thinking and professional coding languages. It’s a multi-award-winning game designed to teach young children professional coding skills and effectively inspires girls to code, with 55% of its users being girls.

“We always talk about why there is a disparity in an engineering team between having enough women to men. Invariably you’ll find that it’s a 70/30 split or an 80/20 split to men. The easy answer is always ‘there’s a pipeline problem.’ There isn’t actually, we’re just not looking hard enough to look at the top of the funnel – women entities, women organizations, women at universities or women societies who are teaching STEM – to bring them through the funnel.”

The two founders of E.A.K. conducted research to identify if it truly is a pipeline problem, where and when the pipeline starts. Research found that it goes back to school-aged children, not young adults. Young children, both boys and girls, are not being taught the seriousness of coding and how coding is a practical skill that can be applied to the workforce. One of the easiest ways to teach this is to gamify it, which E.A.K. has successfully done since 2014.

Looking Back to Look Ahead

While it’s important to celebrate how far we’ve come, Shefali believes it’s equally as important to recognize the amount of work that must continue. “There’s a ton of work to be done,” says Shefali. “We’re still doing it and we’re still working at it and we have terrific allies in chaps across the world but there’s a tremendous amount to be done and I think it’s important to say that it’s worth it. It’s worth doing the work and it’s worth all of us doing these things so that the women who come after us are going to have extraordinary careers in environments where they get to thrive. There’s a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way so let’s take a moment to celebrate it and enjoy it for what it is.”