Banking on Equality

Supriti Bezbaruah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317498315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

It may well be surprising to say that the world should look to India as a model of gender equality. India's banking sector proves the exception, with several women reaching the highest positions in India's top banks, including the country's largest bank.

Based on interviews and surveys of bank employees in India's National Capital Region, this book looks at what lies behind the media rhetoric and provides a systematic analysis of patterns of, and responses to, gender inequality in the banking sector in India. The book uncovers how gender discrimination still persists in the banking sector, albeit in covert forms. Through a comparison of nationalized, Indian private and foreign banks, the book demonstrates how the impact of laws, local cultural norms and gendered workplace practices are mediated through different organizational forms in these different types of banks to create varied experiences of gender inequality.

The book is one of the first books to provide a thorough, in-depth analysis of women's employment in the Indian banking sector, currently an under-researched area.

1
Introduction

In New York and London, women remain scarce among top bankers despite decades of struggle to climb the corporate ladder. But in India’s relatively young financial industry, women not only are some of the top deal makers, they are often running the show.

(Timmons, 2010: 11)

In some ways, 2013 was a grim year for women in India as a spate of gang rapes and sexual assaults tarnished the country’s reputation. But in one area it actually extended its position as an improbable world leader for gender equality: banking. … The country has enjoyed a remarkable success in becoming, by some measures, the best place in the world to be a senior female banker.

(Crabtree, 2014)

… few women still break through the glass ceiling in India. The women professionals who have succeeded are still the exceptions. For every one of them, there are many who were pushed out, pushed down or voluntarily gave up because they could not be super women.

(Sharma, 2013)

… India’s profusion of senior female bankers disguises a much less rosy picture in lower levels of management. Roughly half of the annual intake of trainee bankers at institutions like SBI are women, but only a tiny fraction make it to the executive suite. Some in the industry worry that the shattering of India’s banking glass ceiling is more a trick of the light than a permanent breakthrough.

(Crabtree, 2014)

Hardly a day goes by without a story in the news about women leaders in the banking sector in India. Images of these successful, confident Indian women, a far cry from the usual stereotypical image of Indian women as poor, oppressed victims of male subordination, first sparked my interest in the banking sector in India. I began my research into the experiences of women working in the Indian banking sector to properly understand the reality behind the various, and at times contradictory, reports on what the experiences of these women are.

In the broader context, what made my research more compelling was its global backdrop. The growth of women’s employment, especially in services, has been a worldwide phenomenon: in 2008, women accounted for 40 percent of all employed people worldwide, of whom almost half (46.9 percent) were employed in services (ILO, 2010: 3–5). ¹ The increase in women’s employment is tied to structural shifts in the world economy away from manufacturing towards services and knowledge-based production, as well as the emergence of the new economy ² underpinned by advances in information and communications technologies (ICTs) (Castells, 1996; Coyle, 1997; Perrons, 2004). Scholars argue that women have benefited from the accompanying expansion of employment opportunities in the services sector, including financial services such as banking, as supposedly feminine attributes such as teamwork, caring, serving and communication are increasingly valued (Bradley et al., 2000; McDowell, 1997; Reich, 2001). The Economist (2009) in a news article chronicling the rise of women’s employment in the last 50 years stated, ‘When brute strength mattered more than brains, men had an inherent advantage. Now that brainpower has triumphed the two sexes are more evenly matched.’

Despite the consequent narrowing of the gender gap in labour force participation rates (LFPRs), studies find that the ‘gender revolution’ remains incomplete (Perrons, 2009: 2). Wage disparities between men and women persist – in the European Union, in 2007, women still earned an average of 15 percent less than men for every hour worked (ILO, 2009: 17). In the United States (US), even after the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed, in 2010, women earned on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. That this pay gap has remained largely stagnant for this century, narrowing by less than half a cent every year, is a matter of concern (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2014). Women’s employment worldwide may have increased, but they remain over-represented in part-time and informal sector work (McDowell, 1997; Perrons et al., 2006), as seen in the United Kingdom (UK) where 40 percent of women work part-time (Perrons, 2009: 3).

As more and more women obtain higher educational qualifications, they have entered previously male-dominated professional occupations, such as banking, law and medicine, in unprecedented numbers (McDowell, 1999; Perrons, 2009). In the UK, for example, females now comprise just over half of the workforce in the financial services sector (Ogden, McTavish and McKean, 2006: 40). Despite attaining educational levels similar to men, progress towards equal representation at the senior most positions has been slow. A study published in 2001 found that women’s share of positions at the top worldwide was between 2 and 3 percent (Wirth, 2001: 25). Almost a decade later, there has been little change –the World Economic Forum’s Corporate Gender Gap Report in 2010 found from their survey of more than 600 companies that the number of women chief executive officers (CEOs) was slightly less than 5 percent (WEF, 2010: 5). In 1994, at the current levels of vertical segregation, it was estimated that ‘it will be 475 years before women reach equality in the executive suite’ (Izraeli and Adler, 1994: 7). More recently, a report from the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2014) suggests that it will be another 81 years before gender parity is achieved in the workplace.

Women in the Indian banking sector may not have to wait that long. When I started my research for this book in 2008, there were already a number of women heading banks in India, from Chanda Kochhar at ICICI Bank and Shikha Sharma at Axis Bank to Naina Lal Kidwai at Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC, India), to name a few. Since then, several more women, especially from the country’s nationalized banks, have joined this growing band of top female bankers. When the State Bank of India, India’s largest bank, appointed Arundhati Bhattacharya as the bank’s first female head in its more than 200-year history in 2013, no less than eight women were at the helm of India’s top banks, which control almost 50 percent of the country’s assets (Box 1.1) (Chakrabarti, 2013; Parmar, 2014). This is in stark contrast to advanced industrialized countries like the US or the UK, where there are no overall female bosses of any major banks (Chakrabarti, 2013; Timmons, 2010). In terms of breaking through the glass ceiling, Indian women are clearly far ahead of their Western counterparts, begging the question: what makes the financial sector in India so conducive to women? Why is India so different from other countries? Are the accounts of gender inequality mentioned previously not relevant to the Indian banking sector?

Box 1.1 Some prominent females in the financial sector in India, past and present

• Usha Ananthasubramanian, Chairperson and Managing Director, Bharatiya Mahila Bank
• Vedika Bhandarkar, Managing Director, Credit Suisse, India
• Archana Bhargava, former Chairperson and Managing Director, United Bank of India
• Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson, State Bank of India, first woman to be Chairperson of State Bank of India, India’s largest bank
• Madhabi Puri Buch, former CEO, ICICI Securities
• Homai A. Daruwalla, former Managing Director, Central Bank of India
• Manisha Girotra, former Country Head, UBS, and Country Head, Moelis & Company
• Shyamala Gopinath, former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India
• Lalita D. Gupte, Chairperson, ICICI Venture, and former Joint Managing Director, ICICI Bank
• Vijayalakshmi R. Iyer, Chairperson and Managing Director, Bank of India
• Renu Sud Karnad, Managing Director, Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited (HDFC)
• Naina Lal Kidwai, Chairperson, HSBC India
• Chanda Kochhar, Managing Director and CEO, ICICI Bank
• Ranjana Kumar, former Managing Director, Indian Bank, first woman to become the head of a nationalized bank in India
• Kalpana Morparia, CEO, J.P. Morgan, India
• Kaku Nakhate, India Head, Bank of America Merrill Lynch
• Falguni S. Nayar, former Managing Director, Kotak Mahindra Capital Company
• Shubhalakshmi Panse, former Chairperson, Allahabad Bank
• Chitra Ramkrishna, Managing Director and CEO, National Stock Exchange of India
• Renuka Ramnath, former Managing Director and CEO, ICICI Venture
• Meera Sanyal, former CEO and Chairperson, Royal Bank of Scotland, India
• Aisha de Sequeira, Co-Country Head and Head of Investment Banking, Morgan Stanley India
• Shikha Sharma, Managing Director and CEO, Axis Bank
• Usha Thorat, former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India
• K.J. Udeshi, former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India
• Tarjani Vakil, former Chairperson, Exim Bank, first woman to head a large bank in India
• Kavita Venugopal, India Head, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank

Source: Data collected online from bank websites, various newspaper articles and personal communication with the Reserve Bank of India in August 2014.

Note: This list is meant as an illustration of the prominence of women in the banking and financial sector in India. It is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all women in senior positions in the financial sector.

Providing answers to these questions proves difficult due to the dearth of research on women in the Indian banking sector. While the gendered implications of women’s employment in contemporary professional services have been extensively researched in developed countries, these issues have been relatively under-researched in developing countries (Mullings, 2005). This is partially a reflection of the under-representation of the Global South in social science research in general (Vira and James, 2011; Williams, Meth and Willis, 2009; Yeung, 2007). In economic geography research, for instance:

… it appears that more than two-thirds of the region-specific research published in economic geography’s major journals relates most directly to the conditions, firms, industries, and economies where 18% (1.2) billion of the world’s population (6.6 billion) lives while 82% of the planet (4.1 billion) garners less than 30% (at very best) of publication space …

(Murphy, 2008: 855)

If women from developing countries feature in research, the emphasis is usually on issues relating to poverty, rural areas and the informal sector (Mullings, 2005; Vira and James, 2011; Williams, Meth and Willis, 2009). Such research is undoubtedly important, but clearly, in light of the emergence of the new economy, there is also a need for more research into the rise of women’s employment in white-collar services in India. In recent decades, there has been a growing literature exploring women’s experiences of work and employment in India’s new service economy (Basi, 2009; Kelkar, Shrestha and Veena, 2005; Mitter, 2004; Patel, 2010; Radhakrishnan, 2009, 2011), but these studies focus almost exclusively on employment in information technology (IT) and ICT services. Beyond anecdotal reports in the media, there are very few systematic studies of women in the banking sector in India. The observation made more than 15 years ago that ‘the prospects for women’s employment in other new, trade-related services such as finance and insurance … is not known’ (Joekes, 1995: 41) holds true for India even today.

The key rationale for this book stems from a desire to look further into this relatively neglected area. The book aims to move beyond the celebratory media hype surrounding women’s employment in banking and provide a much-needed empirically informed analysis of gender inequalities in the banking sector in India. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no similar extensive, qualitative study of this kind in English. The unique contribution of this book is in using an extensive evidence base combining both qualitative and quantitative data (questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews) to present a conceptual analysis of gender inequalities based on the perspectives of female employees in the banking sector. The main objective of this book is to explore the extent to which gender equality has genuinely been achieved in the banking sector in India. Is the success of several women in reaching the highest echelons of banking indicative of a radical change in gender relations in corporate India? Or is the picture less promising further down the occupational hierarchy?

News reports, from India and globally, suggest that the success of Indian women in the banking sector has been facilitated by a combination of factors. Institutional contexts, or more specifically, a women-friendly work environment has been frequently cited as a key factor (David and Alexander, 2011; Dhall and Sharma, 2010; Timmons, 2010). The story of Chanda Kochhar of ICICI is instructive – early on in her career, she was struggling to balance her work and family life, a point at which most women end up opting out of the career ladder. Advising her not to quit, her boss, former CEO of ICICI, K.V. Kamath, offered her a half-year break. As David and Alexander (2011) recount, that made the difference. Kochhar stayed on, and 13 years later, succeeded Kamath as ICICI’s CEO.

When it comes to female employees, it appears from news reports that Indian banks are not weighed down by masculine stereotypes. Unlike in Western countries, women face few pressures to act like ‘one of the boys’ (Timmons, 2010). Merit, talent and hard work, rather than gender, are the crucial ingredients for success. In working hard, however, women in India have the vital advantage of the support of domestic help. This enables them to effectively balance the demands of work and childcare, which so often derails the career progression of women in developed countries (Chakrabarti, 2013; Layak, 2014; Timmons, 2010).

Against these views, other studies suggest that Indian women may face particular cultural and social conditions that can impede their career advancement, such as moral codes that discourage women from working at night or make it uncomfortable for men and women to work together, or mobility constraints that make it harder for women to travel alone (Budhwar, Saini and Bhatnagar, 2005; Gupta, Koshal and Koshal, 2006; Patel, 2010). For example, a survey of the heads of human resources (HR) in 59 of India’s biggest employers identified general norms and cultural practices (although these were not specified) as among the main impediments to women’s progression to senior positions in employment (WEF, 2009: 21). How can these issues be reconciled with the success stories of Indian women in banks? This book aims to understand and unravel these seeming contradictions. The book examines the influence of local social, cultural and institutional factors on women’s employment in banking and shows how these factors can create varying patterns of gender inequality even within an increasingly globalized world.

Experiences of gender inequality, however, go beyond a simplistic division of global versus local. What is particularly interesting about the banking sector is that while women’s employment in services such as IT is linked to globalization processes, women’s employment in banking pre-dates economic liberalization (and the associated influence of globalization) (Gothoskar, 1995). In the 1970s and 1980s, nationalized banks were a major source of white-collar employment for women in India (ibid.). After economic liberalization in 1991, foreign banks and new Indian private banks provided new opportunities for women’s employment, and the banking sector continued to attract women (Srivastava, 1999). I wanted to understand the reasons for this continuity within change: why was banking considered a desirable occupation, both before and after liberalization? By comparing the experiences of women in three different types of banks in India – foreign, Indian private and public sector or nationalized banks – this book aims to explore whether, and how, patterns of gender inequality vary across different organizational structures.

Furthermore, if gender discrimination does occur in the Indian banking sector, I wanted to understand how women respond to such discrimination. Are women sufficiently empowered to be able to challenge gender inequalities in the workplace? The potential of women’s employment to ‘empower’ women has been long-debated and continues to be contested in academic studies. The empirical evidence contributing to such debates has been disproportionately centred on export-oriented manufacturing (Gates, 2002; Kabeer, 2000; Wright, 2006) and, more recently, women in IT and call centres (Ng and Mitter, 2005; Patel, 2010). The focus has also been more on empowerment in the domestic sphere rather than on how women are empowered as workers (Kabeer, 2008). Such an emphasis perhaps follows from the presumption that professional women already hold ‘considerable formal power’ (Martin and Meyerson, 1998: 338). While there is considerable concern about the vulnerability of women workers in the informal sector (UNIFEM, 2005), women in the formal sector are considered to enjoy the benefits of legal protection. Given the contradictions evident in India, where women continue to face systematic social, political and economic inequality despite the multitude of government laws ensuring women’s rights, I question such assumptions linking legislation and ‘empowerment’, and assess how, in reality, women in the workplace challenge gender discrimination.

Taken together, this book aims to answer three main questions: First, how are women’s everyday experiences of work and employment in India’s banking sector gendered? What are the main forms of gender discrimination that are prevalent in this sector? Second, how and why do local cultural and institutional factors, including government laws, influence women’s experiences of work and employment? Third, how do women respond to discrimination in the Indian banking sector?

While trying to find answer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gender at work: theorizing gender inequality in the workplace
• 3 Women’s employment in the banking sector: an overview
• 4 Encouraging equality or denying discrimination? Gendered patterns of work and employment in the banking sector in India
• 5 The importance of being respectable: the impact of local cultural norms on patterns of gender equality
• 6 banking sector: the role of institutional factors
• 7 gender inequalities in the Indian banking sector
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index