Milliman at 75 – An interview with the firm’s first female principal
Hear from Milliman’s first female principal, Peggy Pearson, about her path from homemaker (and home economics major) to actuarial leader, all while breaking through the cultural barriers of the time. In honor of Milliman’s 75th anniversary, Peggy sits down with current Milliman principals Angela Bolduc and Kim Guerriero to discuss how she “got into actuarial work on a dare,” her experience as a female leader in a primarily male-dominated field, and what has changed – and still needs to change – for women in the workplace.
Transcript
Announcer: This podcast is intended solely for educational purposes and presents information of a general nature. It is not intended to guide or determine any specific individual situation and persons should consult qualified professionals before taking specific action. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and not those of Milliman.
Angela Bolduc: Hello, and welcome to Critical Point brought to you by Milliman. I'm Angela Bolduc and I'll be your host today. This is a special episode of Critical Point because we're celebrating Milliman's 75th anniversary and we're doing that by sharing stories from the firm's first 75 years. Today's topic is one that I'm personally very excited to discuss, the story of Milliman's first female principal, Peggy Pearson. Peggy joined Milliman in 1973 and was elected principal in 1982. She joins me today along with Kim Guerriero, a consulting actuary and co-leader of the firm’s Women Employee Resource Group. Good morning to you both.
Peggy Pearson: Good morning.
Kim Guerriero: Good morning, Angela and Peggy. Thank you Angela so much for having me.
Angela Bolduc: So Peggy we've actually crowdsourced questions for you from our Employee Resource Group. But before we dive into those, I've heard you had an interesting story about how you started out in the actuarial profession. How did you get into this field?
Peggy Pearson: I'm probably the only Fellow at the Society of Actuaries that had this major in college. It was home economics. And I know you're probably all wondering how in the world did I transfer from that. I started out as a junior home ec teacher. How did I get into actuarial work, and it is kind of interesting. You have to think back to when I graduated from college there weren't that many women who actually went on to get a job. If we did complete college we usually got married right after that and you were expected to have a baby in the first year. So I did that, I got married right out of college and my husband happened to be studying actuarial science, he was really a math genius. And we went on to graduate school at the University of Michigan and he got his associateship very quickly and passed the actuarial exams very fast too. In fact, he was an FSA when he was 24, so that…
Angela Bolduc: Impressive.
Peggy Pearson: …shows you how good he was.
Angela Bolduc: Yeah.
Peggy Pearson: Well, I had a baby that next year and I was very happy actually being a stay-at-home wife, I guess that was what was expected of us. But that was the only child I had and when she went to school, I was just bored to tears and I asked my husband, back then we had to ask our husbands, if I could go back to work. I had only worked one year after I'd gotten out of college as a home ec junior high teacher while my husband was in graduate school. Well, my husband was not very excited about that at all. But we finally concluded that if I could get a teaching job and be home in the summers when our daughter Kim was home that he might be able to deal with that.
Well, we were living in a small Indiana town and there were just no teaching jobs around. So my husband got so tired of listening to me complain about not working that he said, "Well if you think you're so smart”—the one big employer that we had in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was Lincoln National Life and of course they had a lot of actuaries working for them—and he said, "If you think you're so smart, why don't you just take the actuarial exams and apply to Lincoln for a job?"
Well, that made me mad and I thought, "I'll show you, I will." And I got down his calculus book and I'd already taken a couple of calculus classes and so I studied and I studied and I studied and I went to Lincoln when they were giving the exams and I took the first exam and I passed it and I got a better grade than he did on the exam.
Angela Bolduc: I love it.
Peggy Pearson: I know. And then we had a local division of Purdue in Indiana University. My husband and I had both gone to Purdue. And they had an evening class in statistics and so I went and took that, and I passed the second exam and I got a 9 on it. Now I was really rolling. So I went to Lincoln Life and they gave me a job in pensions and so that got me started.
Angela Bolduc: I love that.
Peggy Pearson: So I got into actuarial work on a dare.
Angela Bolduc: Don't tell us we can't do something, right Peggy?
Peggy Pearson: He never should have said that.
Angela Bolduc: I love it, we can do all of it, we can do all the things…
Peggy Pearson: Otherwise I would have been a housewife all my life.
Angela Bolduc: Oh, that’s great. So how long were you with the firm and where were you based out of?
Peggy Pearson: Well, that's another very sad story. My husband decided to take a job with a life insurance company in Salt Lake City and so I had to leave Lincoln naturally, which I hated to do, I loved that firm. And I had no idea of how I could find a job in Salt Lake City, but one of my husband's good friends was Dick Robertson and he was Stuart's son, Stuart Robertson's son. And Dick said, "Well Peggy I think I can get you a job with my dad's firm." And it was very funny because I thought his father was in real estate and I said, "Oh Dick, I don't think I want to get out of actuarial work now that I've spent this time starting the exams and everything." And he said, "Oh no." My husband said, "Haven't you ever heard of Milliman and Robertson?" And I said, "No, I haven't." And Dick said, "Well we're—" It was an actuarial consulting firm that was founded by his father and Wendell Milliman and they had a small office in Salt Lake City.
So I got that job. Well, I really enjoyed our little office in Salt Lake, it was very small, but we had a real problem. Almost all of our clients were in Denver. We had no Denver office at the time. And so Salt Lake was kind of our Rocky Mountain office, but we had very few—little work in Salt Lake. It was all over in Denver. So what was happening is the guys would leave on Monday, go over to Denver, and fly back on Friday. It was really causing a problem with the families, I mean, you know, as you can imagine. So just a few months after I joined the firm the decision was made to move the office to Denver and of course I couldn't go because my husband was here in Salt Lake City. And so basically I just stayed around long enough to get us through the annual statement time, which was the end of that next February, and then we closed the office. And I went to work for one of our clients, Beneficial Life. So I was at Milliman the first time less than a year and I like to say that Milliman left me, I didn't leave Milliman, but, you know.
Angela Bolduc: They moved to Denver, you were there.
Peggy Pearson: They moved to Denver and left me high and dry. In 1979 my husband decided that he wanted—he quit his job, he wanted to get a PhD in what was at that time called system science. It had a lot to do with operations research and computers and he really wanted to do that. And the school that he chose was in Portland State University, which was great for me because it gave me my chance to get back with Milliman. So I called Paul Hart and Paul said, "Yes, absolutely you can come to work here." So I did that. So I had a long layoff. Isn't Milliman forgiving?
Angela Bolduc: That is a great story.
Peggy Pearson: They'll take you back even if you've quit, in fact they did that twice for me.
Angela Bolduc: They knew how special you were Peggy.
Peggy Pearson: Thank you.
Kim Guerriero: So Peggy you said that your husband is a math genius, but getting a 9 on an actuarial exam, I think you're equally a math genius, so congratulations on that.
Peggy Pearson: In fact, it's very funny because my husband used to-- now he passed away many years ago, but one of the things that he used to say was that it was his idea that I become an actuary and he said it was the best idea he ever had in actuarial work was getting me to become an actuary. He kind of forgot the details of how all of it happened.
Kim Guerriero: That's very interesting. So I heard that you had a great story about how you got into the actual profession. I had no idea before hearing it that it would include home economics. So thank you for sharing your story with us.
Peggy Pearson: I have kind of a funny story on that too. Many times in the old days when we were making presentations to a potential new client they would ask us for our educational background. And I remember one time a group of us, multi-office, were making a presentation to the United Mine Workers and I was included in that. And I believe the fellow who was putting together the proposal for Milliman listed my college major as economics. It was home economics. He goes, "Oh, did I miss that?" I think he thought if something like home economics popped out we would immediately lose all credibility.
Kim Guerriero: Maybe he just thought it was a typo and was fixing it.
Peggy Pearson: Precisely.
Kim Guerriero: All right, so thank you for sharing that story. So fast-forward a little bit down the road in your career when you became an equity principal. So just giving a little bit of background for people, for those that don't know, Milliman is owned and run by equity principals or Eps, which are similar to partners in a law firm. So you were Milliman's first female equity principal. Can you talk about that experience and any obstacles that you might have faced on the road to equity principal?
Peggy Pearson: Well yes it actually was kind of a unique circumstance. I went to the Portland office in October of 1979 and then the next year, in 1980, I was made an associate member And what had happened was that one of the reasons that Paul Hart had hired me in the first place was that there was, after Paul in his practice, there were no other FSAs, And unbeknownst to me Paul wanted to actually leave the firm and join one of our clients, the Management Compensation Group. And I think in looking ahead he could see he was going to need somebody if he left the firm to hold the fort. So in 1981 Paul asked me if I'd go to lunch with him and he took me to one of our favorite restaurants. And it was kind of funny because it was kind of like in the movies, the table that he'd gotten for us was right in the center of the restaurant. You know gals, this is typical of when somebody's going to break up with you, they take you to a real busy place and they sit you down and you can't make a scene or anything like that. Anyway, he told me he was going to leave.
Kim Guerriero: "You're my plan."
Peggy Pearson: "I don't know what else to do.” And Paul and I had a really wonderful talk about what our goals were for the office. And we agreed that we had such a wonderful staff, that there were guys there that were really great principal material, but they just needed a few years to get through their examinations, to learn how to produce business and other things. And so I told Paul that yes I would be willing to go for it and manage the office. And so it was really undecided at that time whether or not I would become an equity principal, but the next election was going to be in the spring of 1982, so not too much further away. And I was asked to come up to the Seattle office and meet with Stuart Robertson and Jim Curtis. Stuart had always been one of my biggest supporters and he really encourage me, he said, "I think the office will do wonderfully under you Peggy." And Jim Curtis said the same thing. And so we needed a person to be financially responsible for the office because we didn't have an equity principal to hand off to. So Jim said, "I'll do that, I'll support you." And I think what we did was we showed just in the next six months in 1981 that we could make a profit, a good profit. So at that time, that was one of the main criteria, can the equity principal in charge of that office make a profit? Can they run a successful business? Can they produce new business? And we did all of that. And so I was proposed for principalship and was elected and that was at the annual meeting in 1982. So everything happened very, very, very fast.
Angela Bolduc: Peggy, I had a really similar journey at Milliman where I had very supportive partners and really didn't have a lot of obstacles about my path to equity principalship, but yet we still have a very low number of female equity principals at Milliman. Do you have any thoughts for why that might be?
Peggy Pearson: You know, I have been asked that before. Bob Collette when he was president and CEO of the firm asked me, and that's been some time ago, "Why don't we have more equity principals who are women?" At the time my response was that, "We just haven't had enough time." Remember, when I became an FSA less than 3% of the members of the Society of Actuaries were women and that included a lot of women who stopped at associateship either because of family responsibilities or for some other reasons. So it would ordinarily take a while to join an office, become a Fellow of the Society. And at one time that was an absolute requirement that Stuart and Wendell wanted to adhere to, that you had to be a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries to be an equity principal at Milliman. Now of course that changed, especially as we expanded our business. But at the time I attributed it just to lack of enough time elapsing. Well, but then later on I was asked the same question and, while things seemed to be improving, they didn't seem to be improving at the rate that I thought they would. So I see exactly what you mean, but I'm not sure I have a really good answer for it. Unless there are more people like me, like remember I also left the firm in 1986. My husband was ill. And we knew that he was not going to live to retirement and so we decided to take early retirement. And I didn't come back to the firm until the firm wanted to reopen the Salt Lake office. So I thought, well, perhaps it's family responsibilities, it might be things like that. Because I had a couple of good friends who were absolutely—women, fantastic actuaries. One was a woman by the name of Anne Perkins. We were trying to get a job for her at Lincoln but couldn't because her husband worked there and we had strict rules on hiring spouses and so on. Anne eventually left the profession and I believe was stay-at-home. And then Jack Moorhead, who was a very famous president of the Society of Actuaries, he had a daughter Sheila who passed the exams very rapidly and I thought would have a career like her dad. But after a couple of children she just decided she couldn't do it. So I don't know if that could be part of it, family responsibilities, I'm just not sure.
Kim Guerriero: So Peggy, one of the questions that we got from our ERG was around work/life balance. So can you talk a little bit about what work/life balance looked like for you, especially on your path to principal and while you were principal?
Peggy Pearson: You know, Kim, it kind of sounds like I was doing an either/or doesn't it, like either going full out on career, which I may have done in Portland because I could easily put in 60 hours a week no problem, or all out on family responsibilities. But it wasn't quite that way. For example, my husband being an actuary, he helped me tremendously make a success of that Portland office—unpaid, I might add. But I'll just give you a couple of examples. When I started to manage the Portland office, one of the things I soon found out is that for principals to make sense of their financial statements was almost impossible, it was such a complicated thing. You couldn't tell whether you were making money or not, you know, part ti— Well, my husband took those financials and he delved into them and he made plans, you know, he would say, "Look, this is what you have to do, you're going to have to unload these two clients, they are costing you way more money than they're bringing in, they're not prestigious." It's like 20% of your clients cause 80% of your problems and you're losing money on them. He could figure all that stuff out. I didn't have to do that. I had to transfer a client from our Seattle office to Portland because the client was not happy. Jack came into the office and worked literally night and day, sometimes he just slept four hours at night, on that client, got it all straightened out. They were absolutely delighted with him. But it turned out we successfully saved the client. He did things like that for me. So if you kind of look at it that way, I think Pete Sturdivan said once that at the last two years the Portland office was kind of run like a mom and pop shop.
Angela Bolduc: I love that teamwork that you had.
Peggy Pearson: Yeah. It's interesting that carried over to Salt Lake. But we realized, we told everybody, if we had not had our husbands we couldn't have made it. I mean, I don't know how we would have done it. They did all the computer work, it was just amazing.
Angela Bolduc: What about the home responsibilities like if Kim was sick, was it mostly your responsibility to manage the home-front obligations?
Peggy Pearson: No. We had a number of friends that were living close by and that’s what I usually did if there was a problem. However, Lincoln was fine with me taking off from work if Kim did get sick. She very seldom got sick, but I remember a couple of days I'd called up Lincoln and I said, "Listen, I'll come in at night to finish up this work," that’s sometimes how we handled it. One of our friends would handle Kim during the—or I would stay there during the day. When Jack got home, he would take care of her and I'd just go to the office at night and work. So we kind of did it together, but also we did have the help of friends.
Angela Bolduc: Yeah, I refer to the village, I have two kids myself, 14 and 17, and it's all hands on deck every minute of the day, not only with my husband, but our village here in our town as well, we’re all taking turns helping each other out with rides and support and things like that.
Peggy Pearson: Well Angela do you think that because of that commitment that you have to have to your family, do you think that that is one reason we don’t have as many women going on to, say—I mean, it's tough being an equity principal, nobody would deny that. The amount of time that it's going to take and the dedication and you've got other people depending on you for their livelihoods.
Angela Bolduc: Yeah, I think you're right, I think it is a lot and I think not everybody has the benefit of a supportive partner to be in a team on all fronts at home and at work, and a village to help fill in the gaps, and I think it is a lot of mental and emotional energy of you, almost feels like you're never enough for anybody because you're spread so thin, and how you persevere through that and try to find a way to make the most of every moment. But there is an exhaustion level to that. And so it's something that we're really thinking about here with Milliman in general, but also the MilliWomen Employee Resource Group is, how can we support each other more to find ways to have flexibility, to have support to give ourselves space when the exhaustion is high and reenergize? We can come back and continue what we started. So I think there's a lot of things coming into play, but I do think that work/life juggling act is a big piece where it just becomes too much, especially if you're not as fortunate as you and I are to have those we have around us.
Peggy Pearson: Yes, yes, exactly. You know, Lorraine Mayne and I discussed this one time as well too, and we were wondering if there were possible solutions that actually might be coming to the fore with people being able to work from home and that sort of thing. That's probably actually going to happen, isn't it, with more people—
Angela Bolduc: It has.
Peggy Pearson: —working from home?
Angela Bolduc: Yeah, I was actually really fortunate, I've been here over 15 years and I came on as a remote employee and I was able to work a flexible schedule, I had four 10-hour days, so I could only have my kids in coverage for a few days. My mother-in-law helped some of the other pieces too. And so I was a huge beneficiary of a flexible schedule and so we’ve been really pushing for that as needed for not only remote work, but flexible hours within our IntelliScript® practice at Milliman but even I’m seeing it across other groups at Milliman too and I do think that makes a huge difference.
Peggy Pearson: Those are great ideas. Other than that, it's hard to say what you can do to improve the situation more, and I keep saying time will take care of it and I've been told that I've been a little Pollyannaish on that. Because medicine, look at medicine, you know, we could almost be half and half, lawyers, but actuaries, that still is not—although I may be behind the times on that, I know the percentage of women taking the early exams, that percentage just keeps going up for women.
Kim Guerriero: We're definitely seeing progress in more women taking actuarial exams, so hopefully that trend continues. Just listening to the two of you I feel like if anything I'm taking from this conversation is just surrounding yourself with extremely supportive people both in your career and in your personal life. And I know that I have benefited a lot from the new kind of work-from-home policy in the sense that I don't have to race home at five o'clock to pick my kids up from daycare, so I don't get that one dollar fine for every minute that I'm late, so I can actually have that time with my kids in the evening and then go back to work. I think just one final question that we have for you Peggy, kind of switching gears a little bit again, we've talked about a lot in this conversation, but just one last question for you. What professional skills, values, or ethics did you find that were the most applicable or helpful to you during your career?
Peggy Pearson: Well, as far as skills went, I would say that I was not—maybe I was a better actuary than I thought. I was always comparing myself to my husband who was really brilliant. But I did not think I was necessarily the most skilled actuary in the world, but I did have a good assessment of what I was good at. One of them was client relationships and producing business. That was something I excelled at in the Portland office and also in the Salt Lake City office. And I capitalized on those skills. And I was a very good delegator. So the guys in the Portland office, I am hopeless on computers as you guys can probably tell from me not even being able to get into Zoom easily. So I think it was a recognition of what I was good at and capitalizing on that and being willing to admit that there were things I couldn't do and that I needed to put somebody else in charge of that in the office.
Angela Bolduc: That's so true. We see that all the time, that if you try to be the best at everything, you're not going to be great at anything, you’ve got to really recognize—
Peggy Pearson: Well, you're on your way to failure for sure.
Angela Bolduc: Right. Yeah, you have to build that team with the diverse skill sets and we've been seeing that so much more. As a non-actuary here at Milliman and being able to bring value to the firm, I feel like every room I'm in, I'm the least smart person in the room. But I do have a unique skill set. I think the people skills and relationship-building are really important.
Peggy Pearson: Well, and Angela you could be very wrong about that because I remember my husband had told me one time, "You know, you're a better actuary than I am. You see the big picture more." And I think that was one reason why I was so successful with clients, because I picked an area, my particular area of expertise was multiemployer plans. I loved the unions. People will tell you that my politics, I'm practically a socialist, OK? In Portland, Paul Hart just let me run with that even though were no women actuaries really working for multiemployer plans, because all of the union presidents and the boards of trustees were all male and the management boards were male, and they thought you just could not make it. But I wanted those plans to succeed so badly, and I had the big picture I think as to what they needed to do in negotiating and everything. Well, I made a tremendous success out of that in Portland. But I had to realize that there were some things I wasn't good at, like public plans. I was not good at those, but Mark Johnson was tremendous at working on those plans and so I gave him the crown there. Sometimes you just have to admit you're not really good at certain things.
Angela Bolduc: I think just having, Peggy, your story is so inspiring and I love the barriers that you broke and the people you proved wrong to pave the way for the rest of us that are here, and we're going to be paving the way for the next set of people, so it's very exciting.
Peggy Pearson: Well Angela I think also you have to think of the people that I proved right like Paul Hart and Stuart Robertson—
Angela Bolduc: Very good point.
Peggy Pearson: —and James Curtis and Bill Fleckenstein, people like that and many other supporters that I had, so give them credit too.
Angela Bolduc: It's actually very heartwarming to know that the experience I've had as a female here in the last 15 years is actually a Milliman culture, you know, hearing Stuart being such a huge supporter of you, kind of from the DNA of our firm having that support is just really encouraging. We had some questions of, "Hey, what were the obstacles?" and "What were the things that make it so hard?" And we keep hearing across the firm that it's not Milliman, right, that—granted, we don't have enough female principals and there's definitely something happening, I don't mean to diminish it, but it's something bigger going on because I do think we have so many great people supporting so many people, it's just we have to find ways to create more flexibility. I don't know, something, but it's just nice to know that the history of the support has been there from the beginning because that's very cool and definitely been my experience as well.
Peggy Pearson: Well, one of the things that I always remember from our first principal meetings where we used to have an annual equity principals meeting and one of the things that—we would usually start out the meetings by kind of patting ourselves on the back as to how well we were doing, but the very next thing was, "And how can we get better?" So there's always more we can do in this area and I think we can do better and we will, that's for sure.
Angela Bolduc: That's great. This has been such an inspiring and wonderful conversation, Peggy, thank you so much and thank you, Kim, for joining me. We've been really excited to hear more about this Milliman story.
Kim Guerriero: Thank you Angela.
Peggy Pearson: Thank you Angela.
Angela Bolduc: To learn more about Milliman's 75-year history, anyone listening can visit milliman.com. You've been listening to Critical Point. If you've enjoyed this episode, rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with your colleagues. We'll see you next time.
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Milliman at 75 – An interview with the firm’s first female principal
Hear from Milliman’s first female principal, Peggy Pearson, about her path from homemaker (and home economics major) to actuarial leader, all while breaking through the cultural barriers of the time.