Bank of Asia’s president Lisa Lou lauds the financial services industry for its progress in gender diversity but she warns against the risk of strictly mandating the matter, in a conversation with finews.asia.
Women in the financial sector continue to be spotlighted as employees of choice with an ever-growing focus on gender diversity in the industry. But history tells us that there are often perils attached to strict top-down mandates delivered in the name of the greater good, especially when presumptions of alignment are taken for granted and not tested.
Bank of Asia’s Lisa Lou noted that while some of the unique benefits of female inclusion are intuitively self-evident – the paradigms of another gender or a better understanding of female clients and investors, for example – the current methods of capturing top female talent may not be ideal.
Mandating the Outcome
«Although I support more diversity, I am not a believer of equal outcomes – I believe in equal access to opportunities,» said Lou in a conversation with finews.asia.
Banks are increasingly attempting to fulfill their commitment to achieving gender diversity and they are doing so by mandating the outcome. Standard Chartered has set an internal target for 35 percent of women to fill top positions by 2025. HSBC Singapore issued a statement earlier this year saying it would split all its managerial positions between the two genders by 2022.
«Mandating fixed allocations for hiring certain types of people by gender or ethnicity may not be effective.»
Individual Human Being
Lou believes that it is critical to tell the difference between avoiding bias and mandating greater equality between groups of people.
By mistakenly pursuing the latter path, financial institutions could ultimately risk not only forgoing top talent for the sake of achieving social goals but potentially and counterintuitively shifting the bias to another group of people rather than eliminating it altogether.
«Hiring should be meritocratic,» Lou underlined. «Each candidate should be treated as an individual human being.»
Making Progress
But even without the aggressive pursuit of quantitive targets, Lou notes that the financial services industry has made significant progress in recent years.
Indeed, there are ample examples elsewhere with Goldman Sachs recently featuring 16 females out of a class of 60 newly named partners. And as part of its digital transformation strategy, DBS is placing emphasis on gender representation with an event launched in October dedicated to hiring women in tech roles.
«The financial sector has come a long way since I joined,» said Lou, who in August was named as the first woman to lead Bank of Asia in the role. «The fact that I can be where I am today is proof of progress in the industry. But much more needs to be done.»
