Why Women Still Struggle to Reach Leadership Roles in Ethiopia’s Fast-Growing Banking Sector

A World Bank study of nearly 50,000 Commercial Bank of Ethiopia employees finds that women earn less and remain sharply underrepresented in leadership despite similar qualifications, performance and ambition. The findings point to unequal access to leadership opportunities, childcare pressures, limited work flexibility and mobility constraints, highlighting the need for more transparent promotions, flexible workplaces and stronger childcare support.

A major World Bank study of Ethiopia's financial sector has found that women continue to face significant disadvantages in pay, promotion and leadership even after securing jobs in a highly skilled and relatively well-paid industry. Researchers Ketki Sheth, Toni Weis and Saba Yifredew examined the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), combining six years of administrative records covering nearly 50,000 employees with large employee and manager surveys.

The findings are important for governments, development partners and private companies because they challenge a common assumption: that getting more women into skilled jobs automatically creates workplace equality. Women make up around 30 percent of CBE's workforce but earn about 85 percent as much as men. They are around 80 percent less likely to hold supervisory roles and 68 percent less likely to occupy managerial positions. Women represent roughly 35 percent of employees below grade nine but only about 15 percent at grade 14 and above.

The Promotion Gap Goes Beyond Education and Performance

The study finds little evidence that women's lower position in the hierarchy is mainly due to differences in education, experience, or performance. About 96 percent of the bank's employees have bachelor's degrees, and controlling for education, age, tenure and internal performance evaluations does not eliminate the major gender gaps.

The differences become clearer as employees move higher. At lower grades, where advancement is relatively standardized, gender differences are limited. From grade nine onwards, however, promotion increasingly involves competition and managerial discretion. Men at these levels have an annual promotion rate of about 24 percent, while women are around four percentage points less likely to be promoted.

The explanation does not appear to be weaker ambition. Around 39 percent of eligible men and 36 percent of eligible women applied for higher-grade internal vacancies during the period examined, and both submitted roughly three applications on average. Men and women also reported similar expectations about their future career grades.

Professional networks and negotiation provide little explanation either. Women were broadly as likely as men to receive information about vacancies, obtain recommendations and seek career advice. The study also finds no convincing evidence that women negotiate less.

Informal Opportunities May Shape Who Reaches the Top

One of the biggest differences involves temporary "acting" positions, which allow employees to take on leadership responsibilities and gain experience before applying for permanent senior roles.

Women were about 11 percentage points less likely than men to have ever held an acting position, compared with a male rate of around 48 percent. This is significant because these assignments can provide visibility, leadership experience and an advantage in future promotion competitions.

For employers, the finding highlights a potential weakness in otherwise formal and gender-neutral systems. A company may advertise vacancies equally to everyone, but unequal distribution of acting positions, stretch assignments and other informal opportunities can mean that employees arrive at the promotion stage with different levels of experience.

Making such opportunities more transparent could therefore help businesses strengthen their leadership pipelines while making better use of skilled female employees.

Childcare, Working Hours and Mobility Narrow Opportunities

Time and mobility emerge as another major divide. Women reported about 2.3 days of absence in the previous month compared with 1.3 days for men. Childcare accounted for part of the difference, with women reporting around 0.4 childcare-related absence days against about 0.23 days for men.

Women were also less likely to stay late, work on holidays or travel for work and reported greater difficulty accommodating irregular hours. Yet these differences were not matched by poorer formal performance evaluations.

Geographic mobility was particularly important. About 52 percent of men said they would consider applying for a vacancy more than 50 kilometres from home, compared with around 33 percent of women. Similarly, about 43 percent of men were willing to consider positions outside Addis Ababa, against roughly 26 percent of women.

External job searches show another gap: 22 percent of men had applied for jobs outside the bank during the previous year, compared with 15 percent of women. Men were also more likely to leave CBE, meaning women's weaker representation in senior positions cannot simply be blamed on women leaving the workforce.

These findings have wider development implications. Better childcare services, flexible working arrangements and reduced dependence on relocation or irregular hours could allow more skilled women to compete for senior positions.

What Governments, Development Partners and Businesses Can Do

For governments, the study suggests that policies focused only on female education, recruitment or numerical representation may not be enough. Regulators and public institutions could encourage employers to track gender differences in promotions, temporary leadership assignments, management training and representation at successive levels of seniority.

International development partners supporting women's economic empowerment and private-sector development could help institutions test childcare support, flexible work arrangements and transparent promotion systems. Gender-disaggregated career data could also become a stronger part of monitoring frameworks.

For private companies, unequal advancement creates both economic risks and opportunities. When qualified women remain concentrated in lower grades, businesses may fail to use their full pool of talent, weaken management succession pipelines and lose part of the return on investments in employee education and training.

The researchers caution that the evidence is largely correlational and does not prove that any single intervention will eliminate gender disparities. Future research should test whether transparent acting assignments, structured advancement pathways, childcare support and greater flexibility directly improve women's promotion prospects.

The wider message, however, is clear: increasing women's entry into high-skilled industries is only the first step. For governments, development institutions and employers, the next challenge is ensuring that talented women have equal opportunities to convert education and performance into higher pay, leadership experience and decision-making authority.