Cracking the C-suite code: Why does India have more female bank leaders than any other country

Cracking the C-suite code

CFO India ran the cover story, Cracking the C-suite code: Why does India have more female bank leaders than any other country, in their March 2010 edition.

A recent survey by the Global Economic Forum ranked India 127th out of 136 nations in terms of female economic opportunity.

A survey conducted a few years ago by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) found that only 4% of senior management posts in India’s top companies are held by women.

There is only one sector, in fact, where the situation is completely different: financial services. Among the top 249 Indian companies, only 11% are headed by women, but over half of those, 54%, are in the financial sector. According to a recent survey by executive search firm EMI Partners International.

By contrast, only 7% of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 are in financial services.

The article tries to answer the question, how did so many women get ahead in a sector as notoriously macho as banking, which is still a mostly male bastion everywhere else in the world, even in the United Kingdom and the United States, by profiling three of India’s leading women bankers, Lalita Gupte, Kalpana Morparia and Chanda Kochhar. Read full article [271.46 KBytes]

The article carries the blog of Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO 20-first, Why Words Matter: Dump Diversity, Paint a Mosaic, where she writes, “the underlying meaning of the current use of the word “diversity” in business labels certain groups as diverse, something different from the norm. The norm being homogeneity. But that norm is long gone in global business. And continuing to call the resulting, extraordinary, delightful mishmash of peoples “diversity” is misrepresenting a basic 21st century reality.” Read full blog