TRANSEARCH on Gender Diversity in Finance Roles

Are women better to trust your money with? Well, an increasing number of companies seem to think so, going by a recent spurt in women taking over key finance roles in firms across sectors.

When Coca-Cola announced Sarvita Sethi as its first woman finance head last week, it reinforced a new trend among big corporations including Hindustan Unilever, PepsiCo, Puma, Aditya Birla Group, Vedanta, Castrol and EMC.

"There is an ask now for women at top financial jobs," said Uday Chawla, managing partner at executive search firm Transearch India. He said that over the last few years his company for the first time has had mandates from multinationals preferring women candidates for finance roles at the CXO level.

Search firm executives said the trend is escalating outside of banks and financial institutions, several of which have women in succession roles.

"This is new not only for India but even the US. Earlier the hiring for CXO finance roles favoured men. But now the hiring is more on competence and not on gender," said Chawla of Transearch.

This article was first published in The Economic Times India, read the full article here.