Chanda Kochhar of ICICI told the BBC that women executives in India rise to the top purely on merit and must make sacrifices to succeed. “When you have an organization that is gender-neutral, and when you have a woman who is willing to give to her job whatever it takes, whether it’s long hours, whether it’s commitment to travel, irrespective of the fact that she’s a woman, I think women get that opportunity to rise,” she said. “What it required on my part was to really give to the job whatever it took. So yes, there were children at home, but if the job demands travel, hard work, long hours of work, I think you need to give it.”
But on a happier note, Bank of India’s Iyer observed: “Once they [male colleagues] know that here is a person [female] who is good, the sailing becomes very smooth.”
One distinct advantage that Indian women in the professions enjoy over their Western counterparts is that they don’t have to worry as much about child care – most young Indian mothers can leave their kids at home in the care of grandparents or other relatives who live with them, whereas a rising female executive in London or New York must often deal with costly child care services when they go to work. In addition, virtually all middle-class women in India have (or can easily hire) domestic help to work for them at household duties.
But now comes the hard part – having climbed to the summit of India’s banking hierarchy, these women have to perform. State-owned banks in India are currently facing a multitude of problems, placing enormous pressure on their chief executives – female or male. Business Today reported that many state banks suffer from falling profits and large pools of non-performing assets. Bhattacharya of State Bank of India has stated her main thrust will be to deal with its bad loans – which amounted to 2.91 percent of total loans at the end of September 2013, the highest such level in four years. Iyer’s Bank of India is also marred by bad loans on its books (2.35 percent of loans for 2012/13), while its capital adequacy ratio of 11.02 percent is the lowest among all Indian large banks. Also, Bhargava’s Allahabad Bank had a non-performing asset percentage of 3.19 percent of total loans.
