Introduction

In recent years, the media, both in India and globally, has been replete with stories of women's success in reaching the top-most echelons of the banking sector in India. To name a few, Arundhati Bhattacharya at the State Bank of India, the country's largest bank, Chanda Kochhar at ICICI and Shikha Sharma at Axis Bank, two of India's largest private banks, and Naina Lal Kidwai at the Indian operation of major foreign bank, HSBC. The success of these women in breaking through the glass ceiling is portrayed as indicative of greater gender equality in a country more commonly known for discrimination against women. Beyond media reports, however, women's employment in the banking sector remains under-researched — to what extent have women entered and progressed through the occupational hierarchy? How has the increased presence of women altered traditional gender relations in the workplace? In light of this, this chapter aims to look behind the headlines, and examine women's experiences of work and employment in the banking sector in India.

Based on interviews and a questionnaire survey of bank employees conducted in the National Capital Region (NCR) between 2008–2010, the chapter discusses how gender discrimination manifests itself primarily through gendered organizational practices such as long working hours, the need to network and be geographically mobile. While these are universal constraints for women worldwide, in India, these constraints are linked to traditional norms of femininity emphasizing respectability and the need to prioritize family. When workplace demands conflict with these traditional norms, women invariably adhere to traditional socio-cultural norms at the expense of career advancement.

The chapter is divided as follows — the next two sections set the background by outlining the main trends in women's employment worldwide, and specifically, in the banking sector in India. The following section presents the methodological framework. After this, the gendered patterns of inequalities in the Indian banking sector are examined, followed by an analysis of their underlying causes. The final section concludes.

Gender equality and women's employment

The growth in women's employment is one of the defining features of contemporary labour markets: in 2012, the global female labour force was estimated to be 1.3 billion, of whom almost half were employed in services (ILO 2012, 15, 24).