Women’s Day: Banks aim for more women power in 2024

Currently, the share of women in the Indian banking sector remains low due to a variety of reasons such as lack of social support and work life balance

A clutch of mid-size private sector banks are looking to hire more women employees in 2024, data from at least three banks sourced by Moneycontrol showed. Mumbai-based RBL Bank is planning to increase its women workforce from around 23 percent or 2,800 employees to around 28 percent in 2024. “Our current women employees are around 23 percent or 2,800 out of the total workforce. We plan to increase this to 28 percent in 2024,” a bank spokesperson said to Moneycontrol.

For City Union Bank, the process to hire is already in progress with around 220-230 recruitment letters issued to women employees. “Our plan to ramp up hiring women employees is already in place and we have issued appointment letters to around 220-230 of them already,” a senior executive said on condition of anonymity.

Similarly, Mangalore-based Karnataka Bank, which has one of the highest women workforce, plans to ramp up hiring in 2024. “Currently, we have around 2,767 women employees which comes to around 31.40 percent,” said a senior executive, who did not wish to be named.

Women and Indian banking sector

Currently, the share of women in the Indian banking sector remains low due to a variety of reasons such as lack of social support and work life balance, and so on. The country’s largest bank, the State Bank of India (SBI), as of March 2023, had 63,162 women employees out of its workforce of around 2.35 lakh.

Numbers of HDFC Bank showed that the bank had 29,851 women employees in its workforce of 1.73 lakh employees.

The Indian banking sector has had some women chiefs in the past. Among the women achievers in Indian banking, Arundhati Bhattacharya (first woman chief of SBI), Shikha Sharma (former CEO, Axis Bank), Chanda Kochhar (former MD & CEO, ICICI Bank), and Kalpana Morparia (former CEO, South and Southeast Asia, JP Morgan) headed large banks, while Madhabi Puri headed ICICI Securities between 2009 and 2011.

In March 2022, Puri became the first woman chief of India’s market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Padmaja Reddy, Founder and former Chief of Spandana Sphoorty, an iconic organisation in microfinance, led it through one of the worst phases in the history of Indian micro-lending during the 2010-2012 Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis.

Other names include Usha Ananthasubramanian, former chief of PNB, and Padmaja Chunduru, MD and CEO of National Securities Depositories and former head of Indian Bank. Currently, Union Bank of India is the only lender to have a woman Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director (CEO & MD), A Manimekhalai.

The bank executives Moneycontrol spoke to said that the hiring of new women employees would be at the junior level, (branch and relationship manager)   and at the senior or top level.

“The new workforce will be placed either on the junior level or on the top level of the bank,” the executive from City Union Bank said.

Karnataka Bank sources also said that the process is ongoing for recruitment of women across all positions.