Funmi Babington-Ashaye Bares Her Mind On Discrimination She Faced While Climbing The Corporate Ladder

• Funmilola
• September 22, 2017
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The sixth female President and Chairman of Council of Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria and the Founder/Managing Director of Risk Analyst Insurance Brokers Limited, Funmi Babington-Ashaye is a woman who has achieved so much in her 30-year career.

Funmi served as the first female Managing Director of Cornerstone Insurance Plc, one of Nigeria’s foremost financial institutions, for 16 years and quit to start her own firm.

At the end of her tenure, the federal government specially commended her performance and indeed, offered to retain her as the substantive MD/CEO but she politely declined.

In a recent interview, Babington-Ashaye revealed the major challenges she faced while climbing the corporate ladder as a woman.

She also shared a strategy on how women can maintain a work-life balance.

She said,
”I realised that as a female, I had to do three or four times what my male counterparts were doing for me to get recognised. Even before I became the Managing Director of Cornerstone Insurance Plc, at a point, a male was brought in because they thought I couldn’t do the job.

Unfortunately, the person didn’t deliver and when I was brought in, within two years, I turned the whole place around. So the challenge I faced most was that people rarely believed in me as a woman.

People sometimes think women won’t be able to deliver. It’s a major challenge and as a female, you have to do a lot for you to be recognised and given the opportunity to express yourself. I must say it’s tough for women.

Sometimes when I was in the office and my child was sick, I would have to quickly rush to the hospital and return to the office again. Sometimes I wouldn’t tell them my child was sick because by the time you started saying ‘my child is sick’ every now and then, they would just write you off.

So, women have to do much more than men, which is even one of the reasons I thought I had to quit someday or else so many things would suffer. As a woman, you have a home to run apart from work, meaning you have to work much more than a man.

There’s discrimination against women in the workplace because some people don’t realise women have homes to run and that if they don’t have peace at home, they can’t deliver at work. If you don’t have a settled home as a woman, you can’t just perform.

But if you have peace at home, you will grow in your profession. In fact, most times as a woman, you have to pay 70 per cent of your attention to your home to be successful at work.”

According to Funmi, her strategy for maintaining work-life balance is

”Pay more attention to your home than to your job. The job will always be there. And if perhaps you lose it, your family will always be there for you. This has always been my principle and I have made many sacrificial decisions because of my home. If you stabilise your home, your work will stabilise. I know many families that after their homes crashed, they started failing.”