In a speech at a finance conference in Hong Kong on Friday, HSBC chief executive Stuart Gulliver (pictured) criticised the bank's lack of diversity in senior positions.
"To discriminate against women is to discriminate against talent," Gulliver said. "It's unfair. It's wrong. And it's a really poor business decision. This is not about being cuddly, it's about competitive advantage."
About half of HSBC's 261,000 workers are women, but this figure falls below a quarter at senior management level. The bank has four women, all non-executives, on its board of seventeen.
"That shouldn't be taken as a signal that the job is done because having four women on a board of seventeen people doesn't necessarily tell you very much about the experiences of the 125,000 women in the rest of the organisation," Gulliver said.
Last month's departure of Burberry's chief executive Angela Ahrendts means there are only two female chief executives in the FTSE 100 – Alison Cooper of Imperial Tobacco and Carolyn McCall of EasyJet.
A report last week from Cranfield School of Management showed women now account for 19% of FTSE 100 and 15% of FTSE 250 board positions.
This is the highest proportion of female board members since Cranfield first began monitoring in 1999.
