On International Women’s Day, I’ve been too busy enjoying the various panels at All About Women to write anything particularly deep or meaningful. So here are a few links. First, just as last year, The Economist has published a glass ceiling index. Sadly, Australia has dropped down this year below the OECDContinue Reading
This is a guest post from my colleague, Zhan Wang, who was one of the organisers of our actuarial hackathon for our actuarial team. It was inspired by a number of the responses to this post, that asked how a team of actuaries could help the community. On Friday 13thContinue Reading
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is not over yet. But there have recently been a few cautious articles suggesting that it is getting better, and that perhaps the worst is over. The Economist, probably the mainstream media source I trust the most on this, says, The outbreak continues toContinue Reading
Every quarter (since June 2008), APRA summarises various financial statistics from the life insurance industry in a quarterly report. Every quarter, I read it eagerly, to see if it answers the question that I am often asked, “how will we know if the life insurance cycle has turned?”. The total industryContinue Reading
I’ve written up my annual page about what I read in 2014 here. In this post, I’m just mentioning the books that I enjoyed the most. First, The Wife Drought, by Annabel Crabb. I reviewed that one here, and you can see I really enjoyed it. It’s my pick for the year. Second, The SixthContinue Reading
In the past two days I have read two insightful pieces of research into how to create an organisation where women can progress. Chief Executive Women commissioned a study with Bain & Co which used the concept of net promoter score (advocates minus detractors to a specific question) to tease out what aspects ofContinue Reading
I’m a bit behind here, but APRA released their quarterly life insurance statistics this month. I’ve done a quick graph of the rolling 12 months profits since APRA first started releasing these statistics. Note that Group Insurance and Disability Income Insurance are different subsets of the total – the subsetContinue Reading
When someone in my team wants my help with something, I often find myself playing the role of cardboard manager. Someone I worked with 15 years ago coined the term and I’ve used it ever since. I find myself asking them to explain the issue to me, and what they need meContinue Reading
Since I blogged about Ebola a couple of months ago it’s become very mainstream news (so much so that the primary school kids are talking about it now). So here are a couple of great diagrams that caught my eye from this Economist graphical summary of various ways of thinking about Ebola.Continue Reading
Regular readers of this blog might remember a previous post of mine wondering about the role of the Appointed Actuary (AA) in life insurance. Since that post, the Actuaries Institute has formed a taskforce, of which I am a member. We had an insights session this week, in which we outlined ourContinue Reading