Piyush Gupta, CEO, South East Asia Pacific, Citibank - Building Gender Balanced Business

“At the end of the day, it is not about creating processes to change women; it is about creating processes to change the company.”

Citibank’s leaders agreed with the thesis that it needed to improve its ability to recruit more talented women. The challenge, says Gupta, is in making it happen. “We started with the usual things such as Women’s Councils and Women’s Groups,” he adds. But he now realises that this is not enough. “At the end of the day, it is not about creating processes to change women; it is about creating processes to change the company.”

Flexibility and networking
Change requires the leaders to be “evangelists” first, he says. Then they can examine and explore different ways of making the necessary adjustments. Creating as much work flexibility as possible is one key strategy. Another programme the company has tried is to run networking events to make sure high-potential women get a chance to meet senior managers.

Targets for managers
Gupta has also looked into the question of quotas and targets and has concluded that the best approach is to create processes whereby managers have to set their own targets to increase the proportion of women they hire. He was wary of the criticism that this would be a form of positive discrimination but is convinced that this will not be the case. “Look, if you’re a smart business manager and you know you have to hire a certain number of women, you’re going to make absolutely sure that you don’t hire lemons. Doing so would only hurt your business.”

“Look, if you’re a smart business manager and you know you have to hire a certain number of women, you’re going to make absolutely sure that you don’t hire lemons. Doing so would only hurt your business.”

At present, about 20% of Citibank’s senior business managers in the South East Asia region are women. This percentage improves considerably at the next level of leadership. But there are variations. For example, in relation to countries like Thailand there is a joke doing the rounds that they will need a male diversity committee, because of the high numbers of women managers relative to men. In both Thailand and Malaysia, the governors of the central banks are women, which is indicative of the strong role women play in their economies. In other countries such as Japan and the Republic of Korea, the proportion of women in management is extremely low.

One of the challenges, says Gupta, is to increase the number of women in the more demanding jobs, the so-called “extreme” jobs such as investment banking. He feels that in principle it should be very easy to make these jobs flexible.

Gupta is at the beginning of his journey. But he has already learned some crucial lessons, especially the need to change the organisation so that it becomes better at attracting and keeping talented women. It is innovating forward, recognising the sheer power of the economic opportunity offered by women. In short, it is a company to watch.