Gender diversity in banks? Hmm ...

Congratulations to all on International Women’s Day. It seemed appropriate today to take at look at how the world’s major banks are performing in improving gender diversity in their senior management ranks – a critical aspect of the better cultural attunement banks say they are aiming for. So I took a look at the most senior management bodies of banks designated as globally systemically important and a selection of large brand-name banks operating internationally to see how they fare.

I looked at 60 banks across the US and Canada, Western Europe, Japan, China and Australia, which I felt was enough to make a representative sample. I’ve produced a sizable spreadsheet and a league table which I won’t share here -- it’s a little unwieldy in its current form – but here’s the summary.

The banks I reviewed have 871 bankers in their senior executive ranks. Of that total, 147 are women. That’s broadly speaking one in six – not fantastic but frankly better than I expected. But on further inspection, only three have women at the helm – Bank of Ireland, Santander and Swedbank; there are only three group CFOs; and only half (73 women) run business lines or country/regional groups i.e. one in 12.

Put another way, half of the women in senior management are in various support roles: 32 of the banks in my sample have women running compliance, marketing, administration, communications and corporate affairs etc; 25 have women running HR; 11 have female CROs.

Top of my league table? Commonwealth Bank of Australia and DnB Nor were joint first, with women occupying six of 13 senior management positions and an equal number (3) running businesses, divisions or group subsidiaries. Swedbank came third. It actually has more women on its group executive committee than CBA or DnB but has a slightly lower proportional score because its GEC numbers 19.

Bottom of the table? UniCredit, just below Intesa Sanpaolo, with no women at all in their combined 41 senior management ranks. Of the dozen positions above the Italians are five Japanese institutions, with only two women represented among 85 senior executive positions. Comments?