Women in Banking : Not moving up the career graph fast enough

Coimbatore/Mangalore, September 14: Bank jobs have always attracted women.  Take any branch in your town or city and you are likely to find quite a few women ‘manning’ the counters. Most of them join as clerks, and a few, as officers. Today, some of the big banks have women at the helm too.

Yet, the representation of women in the executive cadre (at the level of Chief Manager and above) is yet to improve.

According to the Khandelwal committee report on HR issues of public sector banks, till 2009, of the total women workforce of 78,000-plus, only around 300 of them were in executive positions. More than 47,000 belonged to the clerical cadre.

So, why have more women not gone up the career graph?

The challenges

“It is not that they are incompetent, but the challenges of work-life balance coupled with transfers force them to not go beyond a point in their career,” said Usha Ananthasubramanian, Executive Director, Punjab National...