Women in Leadership

We sought to examine the current state of gender-diverse leadership around the world to see just how far the needle has moved and what remains to be done.

Women’s World Banking staff attended the most recent Leadership Conference, hosted by The Wharton School of Business. What were the lessons they took home?

Findings and experiences on advancing gender diversity in corporate leadership from Women’s World Banking, Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index and Deutsche Bank.

Women’s World Banking studied the staff composition and hiring practices of banks in Southeast Asia to find how to best promote diversity in the labor force.

Our Women in Leadership program was only for women leaders in financial institutions. This visionary leader thought her low-income clients should get it too.

Our “visioning” exercise gives high-potential women leaders the time and opportunity to think, plan and grow into strong leaders in financial inclusion.

Women’s World Banking Fellow Sandy Salama profiles head of our Tunisia network member, Enda inter-arabe, from her early history in journalism to a prominent financial inclusion advocate for women.

After launching our leadership and diversity program offerings in 2009, Women’s World Banking set out to study how leadership trainings can best translate into bigger and more sustained changes at the institutional level. We asked ourselves: what aspects of our program design most effectively drove this kind of change?

Fellow Ines shares the lessons she took home with her from a week with the Women in Leadership Program in Mexico, supported by MetLife.

Besides the extent of their outreach and their ability to offer diverse products, an MFI’s success is now being measured by operational, financial, social, and gender indicators. In February 2014, Women’s World Banking’s Leadership and Gender Diversity program team provided Crecer, Crédito con Educación Rural in Bolivia just this opportunity to strengthen its team of managers through the Management Development Training program.

It is a rare sight to see a group of women leaders come together to spend a week reflecting on their lives, professions and leadership impact. Yet this is exactly what a group of high-potential women leaders and managers did in Mumbai, India last November to build their skills, confidence

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, Women’s World Banking hosted an online roundtable with three alumni from our signature Women in Leadership program to reflect on their learnings from the program, how they have implemented these to become better leaders in their institution and ways this has inspired positive change among their colleagues and clients.

A new study from Thomson Reuters finds that companies with gender-diverse boards perform better than companies with zero women on their board. This echoes what the Center for Microfinance Leadership has known all along: that diverse perspectives lead to stronger decisions and healthier institutions…

Under Joyce Banda, Malawi’s economy is recovering, with manufacturing expected to grow six percent and agriculture 5.7 percent (World Bank) and respect for democracy and human rights has returned to the country (International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute).

In 2013, Women’s World Banking’s Center for Microfinance Leadership (CML) was given the incredible opportunity to create a new Senior Leadership Exchange to grow its own product offering while supporting the development of women leaders in microfinance.

The Citi Foundation and Women’s World Banking team up to expand the Women in Leadership Program Women have played a critical role since the early days of microfinance, both in the founding of microfinance institutions (MFIs) and as a substantial portion of the client base. In recent years, as the