India’s top woman banker sees cracks in glass ceiling

mumbai — The first female head at one of India’s biggest banks says a ruling forcing firms to appoint women directors to boards has eased chronically lopsided gender ratios — but warns too many firms are still failing to embrace diversity.

State Bank of India chairwoman Arundhati Bhattacharya told AFP that the regulator’s moves to get rid of the “old boys’ network” and demand women were appointed to boards had led to posts being filled by family members. However, she said she was fine with that if they have the ability.

India changed its laws in 2013 to force publicly listed companies to have at least one woman among their board directors — around 96 per cent of whom were men at the time.

After the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) regulator issued a comply-or-be-fined deadline in March 2015, firms scrambled to act, drafting in wives, daughters or other relatives to fill the spots. “A lot of women who are getting inducted after SEBI’s rule are family members. And this isn’t a problem as long as they understand the business. “But we believe it is important to get an outsider’s perspective,” said Bhattacharya, who joined SBI in 1977 and rose through the ranks to the top of the country’s largest and oldest commercial lender.

As hiring managers complain about a lack of talented women candidates for board-level jobs, her view is that they simply have not looked hard enough. “Even today I find many people saying we don’t find properly qualified women. What they’re saying is they are not networked enough.” The problem is not only at the top — across the country only 27 per cent of women work, according to the International Labour Organisation, which ranked India 120th among the 131 nations on female labour participation in 2013.

“Seventy-five per cent of these appointments are non-independent and drawn from family members, thereby failing to bring any diversity to corporate boardrooms,” Pranav Haldea, managing director of Prime Database, a firm that compiles capital markets data, told AFP. Bhattacharya cites the challenge of

A lot of women who are getting inducted after SEBI’s rule are family members. And this isn’t a problem as long as they understand the business Arundhati Bhattacharya Chairwoman, SBI

changing attitudes in a society that still largely views women as primary caretakers and says having children leads many to fall off the corporate ladder. To address the problem, in 2014 she brought in two-year sabbaticals to allow women to take career breaks without falling out of the workforce. “We want to ensure that men also take up their portion of responsibilities during child care and women continue working from home, so they don’t face drawbacks or fall behind,” she said.

As the only woman chief of a public sector bank, Bhattacharya cuts a lonely figure, although Chanda Kochhar and Shikha Sharma head the private ICICI and Axis banks.

Bhattacharya, named the world’s fifth most powerful woman in finance by Forbes Magazine, has won praise from investors for bringing about a digital transformation at the 210-year-old former Imperial Bank of India. —