Europe’s banks are getting more women on their boards

The Italian Unicredit did particularly well in the ranking this year. The promotions for the managers Höllinger and Rast in the German subsidiary came too late for the ranking, but Unicredit still made it to third place in the BCG Gender Equality Index. In the previous year, the Italian institute was still in 30th place. The Norwegian DNB defended its top spot, which, alongside the second-placed major Irish bank AIB, has an equal number of male and female managers on the board.

German financial institutions have also done relatively well: Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank, which are among the 50 largest banks in Europe, are both in the top ten this year. “Commerzbank was there last year, and Deutsche Bank has now caught up. From a German perspective, the result is encouraging,” says Jan Koserski, partner at BCG and responsible for the study alongside BCG partner Claudia Rasper.

“Overall, the banking industry is making progress on the issue of gender equality, even if we would like to see more speed when it comes to appointments to the board of directors,” says study author Rasper. “At the current rate, it would take at best another ten years for us on the bank boards to achieve equal representation.” This is also due to the fact that only one in three new board members would have a woman.

According to the BCG study, which does not name any institute, there are still no women on the management board in six of the top 50 banks. According to Handelsblatt research, this applies to the Austrian Raiffeisenbank International, the Hungarian OTP Bank, the Danish Jyske Bank and the Italian BPER Banca.

ECB urges banks to be more diverse

Even the banking supervisors of the European Central Bank (ECB) are now pushing for a more colorful mix on the boardroom floor: “Bank board members must be diverse, not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of broader diversity,” said the Vice President of the ECB Banking Authority, Frank Elderson, in a speech in June.

By the end of 2021, a third of the banks supervised by the ECB would not have met their internal targets for the proportion of women on their boards. The topic of diversity has now even made it onto the ECB’s list of priorities for the next two years.

From BCG’s point of view, however, just looking at the number of female top managers is not enough. “Real equality is not achieved when the same number of men and women sit on the board, but when they also perform equivalent tasks,” says study author Koserski.

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And in this area, the deficits in European banks are still particularly large. “Men are far more likely to become CEOs or chief financial officers or chief IT officers. Women are more often to be found in less well-endowed departments such as human resources, marketing or communication,” says Jasper, the author of the study. The overall positive trend in new appointments does not necessarily lead to real equality in terms of influence and remuneration.

According to the analysis, 48 ​​percent of the HR department is in the hands of women, and 39 percent of the marketing department. In the finance department, the proportion of women is just nine percent. One of the few exceptions is the CFO of Commerzbank, Bettina Orlopp.

The pattern continues for newly hired executives: three in four new marketing executives are women, but only one in seven chief executives. As a result, only seven of the top 50 banks are headed by a woman. This applies, for example, to DNB boss Kjerstin Braathen or Carina Akerstrom, CEO of Svenska Handelsbanken.

This imbalance contributes to the fact that female board members earn an average of 22 percent less than board members. Because CEOs, IT bosses and finance bosses earn the best in banks, HR and marketing managers the worst.

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According to management consultant Koserski, banks fall into two camps when it comes to gender equality: There are institutions that take the issue extremely seriously and see a competitive advantage in becoming better in this area. “These banks optimize themselves as purposefully as other banks optimize their credit processes,” he says. At the Norwegian DNB, for example, inequality can hardly be measured from the outside. “And then there are banks that do just what is required by law.”

The legal pressure on financial institutions will increase in the coming years. Because in June, the European Union passed a directive that obliges companies to have more equality in management bodies. From 2026, either 40 percent of the supervisory board positions or 33 percent of the management board and supervisory board must be reserved for the “underrepresented gender”.

There are also salary differences on the supervisory board

So far, there have already been regulations in many countries for a quota of women on supervisory boards. This is probably the main reason why the proportion of women on supervisory boards is already 39 percent, almost twice as high as on the executive board. There are female supervisory board members in all top 50 banks.

However, gender-specific differences also exist in the supervisory bodies, observes BCG expert Rasper: “In many supervisory boards there are differences between men and women when it comes to who sits on the important committees and in how many of these bodies. This also has an effect on the remuneration, which is higher on average for men.”

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