<b>Shyamal Majumdar</b>: Social dropout

Access to education for women has increased, but majority of them still stay away from employment

Just a day before Corporate India went overboard in celebrating International Women’s Day, State Bank of India Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya made a telling comment. At the entry level, 33 per cent of employees of the country’s largest bank are women, she said. However, at the top management level, that figure is just four per cent.
 
The situation is no better at ICICI Bank, India’s largest private bank. A study by the ICICI Group showed that at junior management levels, the representation of women in attrition is higher by around two per cent than their representation in the total grade