Becoming the bank of choice for women in Pakistan

We supported HBL in developing a Gender Action Plan to improve the representation and retention of women across its workforce as a key driver of its ambitions to reach more female customers.

Habib Bank Limited (HBL) was established in 1941 as the first commercial bank in Pakistan and it has since grown to be the country’s largest private sector bank. More recently, it has also sought to become the bank of choice for women in Pakistan against a challenging contextual backdrop. The country is one of the lowest ranked in the world on the Global Gender Gap Index report (145 out of 156 in 2022). One of the biggest gaps is in terms of labour force participation; women make up just one quarter of the labour force.

Seeing an opportunity to better serve female customers, HBL launched Nisa, a women-only banking platform in 2016. However, it acknowledged that Nisa’s success would also require HBL to address its own gender imbalance. In 2015, women represented only 12 per cent of its employees. This was a notable improvement from 2005 (when this figure stood at 3 per cent), but insufficient to position it as the preferred bank of choice for women.

As such, in 2018, we collaborated with HBL to develop a Gender Action Plan to help integrate gender diversity into its organisational fabric. Through targeted training sessions, we empowered HBL’s leadership and staff to recognise the business case for diversity, highlighting its transformative impact on performance, innovation, and customer engagement.

HBL’s share of women in its workforce grew by 6 percentage points between 2018 and 2022, and the company is on track to meet its 25 per cent female workforce target by 2025.

Looking ahead, our shared goal is to proactively identify opportunities to continue deepening gender diversity efforts, ensuring that HBL’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and women’s empowerment – within the bank and amongst its customers – remains at the forefront of its operations.