In 2017, Holmes Murphy deployed an initiative to elevate, celebrate, and propel female leaders within Holmes Murphy. This initiative is coined “WOW” — which stands for Women Optimizing Women. We were led by our then Chief Financial Officer (and current Chief Innovation Officer), Ellen Willadsen, and the original makeup of the group was our women shareholders — at the time, 41 out of 115 in total.

Fast forward to 2022, and we have now broadened our WOW consortium to welcome participation by all women in our company who wish to engage.

As we considered areas for a more expansive approach to WOW, we have hosted movie viewings, activated self-defense courses, and offered up a book club for interested participants, to name just a few.

In addition to this, we wanted to find a way to recognize women within Holmes Murphy who hold two full-time jobs — one within our own company, and the other as a mom. This led us to the formation of the “Moms Who WOW” award, which is a yearly recognition of moms who go above and beyond at home, at work, and within our communities. If you take a look at the word “WOW” upside-down, it spells “MOM,” which we felt very fitting and on-brand.

Very recently, we recognized our three newest Moms Who WOW. One of the most special components of this recognition is that nominations are submitted and written by our coworkers at Holmes Murphy, but the actual selection of award recipients is done by an outside party of women leaders through the Financial Executive Women’s group called “FEW.”

We truly believe in the importance of uplifting and elevating women in the workplace as you can see from the mentions above. But, it’s more than that. As a part of our recent recognition during an all-employee meeting, we released new statistics around Holmes Murphy’s females and their proportion of leadership. Here are just a few of the stats:

• 69 percent of our Enterprise Leadership Team are women
• 40 percent of our shareholders are women
• 61 percent of our employees are women

We want Holmes Murphy to be a place that celebrates, recognizes, attracts, and retains women. We recognize the insurance industry needs to make an effort in elevating women, and we are working to lead the way in this area. We are proud of the continued progress we have made and continue to make — for Holmes Murphy, our employees, shareholders, and for the greater insurance industry at large!

That’s something to celebrate with a great, big WOW!