Sri Lanka leads South Asia in recruiting women for banking industry
The research data showed that women representation drops from 40 percent at entry level to 27 percent in middle management and further to 20 percent in the senior management roles.
Sri Lanka surpasses all its South Asian counterparts in recruiting women at entry level in the banking sector, a recent report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) highlighted.
Women comprised 46 percent of new recruits and 27 percent of board positions, making Sri Lanka the leader in board level gender diversity, according to the report.
Titled ‘Women’s Advancement in Banking in Emerging South Asian Countries’, the IFC, in collaboration with the Australian government, had assessed the private sector commercial banks in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
The research in Sri Lanka was conducted across seven leading private commercial banks, representing 41 percent of the market share. The report showed that 38 percent of the workforce in these banks were represented by women and 70 percent of them aspire to move to senior roles.
However, progression of women in the sector does not match their career aspirations or progression compared to men, the findings of the report revealed. This is in spite of Sri Lanka being very close to gender parity in recruitments and workforce, compared to the global averages.
The research data showed that women representation drops from 40 percent at entry level to 27 percent in middle management and further to 20 percent in the senior management roles.
Barriers such as lack of fair evaluations, sociocultural constraints and non-conducive work environments are identified to curtail women’s growth prospects in the country.
Moreover, more than 50 percent of middle managers, many employees and senior managers in Sri Lanka were sceptic about the importance of female leadership for business, the report stated.
Seventy-eight percent of the men, who were consulted, did not believe that having more women leaders resulted in business benefits.
