The Decision Makers: A Conversation with Women’s Market Leaders

Leaders shared their strategic rationale for serving the Women’s Market, the challenges/roadblocks along the way – including the impact (positive and negative) of disruption on their strategy – and the importance of personal leadership in this journey. 

Key Points

• – Supporting women and empowering them economically is not only the right thing to do to achieve sustainability, but the smart thing to do to create needed economic opportunities.
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• – Women are a huge untapped market. Before launching their program, 22 percent of The City Bank’s customers were female, equivalent to 361,000 women. However, there are 40 million potential women customers in Bangladesh.
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  • The City Bank has set up ‘women’s branches’ modeled on coffee houses, where women can meet, converse, bank and network.
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• – As one of the first steps, BLC Bank adopted a definition for a women-owned business, disaggregated data by gender and integrated gender as a main component of client data – whether for individuals or companies.
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• • Now BLC Bank has been working on debunking gender stereotypes. For example, women are perceived as bad drivers, when in fact it is male drivers who have the most fatal car accidents.
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• – Male leaders need to invite more men to the conversation to convince them that economically empowering women is good for business.
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• – We also need to change the mindsets of women who think that men should be the leaders.
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• – It is critically important to train everyone on the value of the Women’s Market and set KPIs, particularly for the C-Suite.
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• – Embedding an internal cultural change requires a mindset shift from a conventional product-centric bank to a dynamic customer-centric bank. Shifting the mindset requires intensive training and continuous communication from the top down to mainstream the program and get all stakeholders’ buy-in.
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• – The City Bank found that their 1,200-strong salesforce was not interested in targeting women, so they changed their incentives: For every five new accounts that are opened by men, they give five points; for every four new accounts that are opened by women, the give five points.
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• – Even after anti-bias training, BLC Bank found they had to put extra bonuses in for sales to women. Then people realized, “This isn’t too hard; we can do this.”
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• – Modifying workforce policies may be necessary, including employee grievance procedures, sexual harassment, review of gender pay gap, etc.
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• – The City Bank opened up a Childcare Center in the Head Office for employees who are parents, and still found resistance with mothers leaving the workforce to take care of their children. These are entrenched cultural norms.
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• – Distribution and accessibility are more important than product changes. At Zanaco they found the existing products they had were sufficient for women’s needs, but they just needed to be more accessible – and particularly for women entrepreneurs. 
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• – The public sector should also believe that we are not doing women a favor in allowing them to work and produce – we are doing ourselves a favor.