"It is INTELLECT and the ability to deliver that determine your career growth at ICICI." Kalpana Morparia Executive Director

"Each time OPPORTUNITIES were thrown up, ICICI has looked for the right person for the job." Chanda Kochhar, Executive Director

"Non-transferability has played a ROLE in retaining and nurturing female talent." Madhabi Puri-Buch, CEO, ICICI Home Fin. & Web Trade

I haven't had much luck lining up appointments for this article on ICICI. Joint managing Director Lalita Gupte is in New York; ICICI-Pru Life CEO Shikha Sharma in London; and Ramani Nirula, Senior General Manager, somewhere in Vietnam-all on work. That means I'll have to start this article with some numbers-three of the seven members on the executive management at the Board level of ICICI Bank (the merged entity) are women, Lalita Gupte, Kalpana Morparia, and Chanda Kochhar-and some good humoured carping by the few male ICICI execs I met. Such as the one who said he rarely lets his female colleagues ahead of him in the queue at the luncheon buffet that accompanies brainstorming sessions or training seminars (they do lots of both at ICICI). ''If you wait for the ladies, you will wait for ever.'' Such tongue-firmly-in-cheek cavilling aside, ICICI is a gender-neutral organisation. Apart from the three on the board, there are five women among the 22 executives who constitute ICICI's senior management. In all, around 33 per cent of all employees are women. That's a whole universe away from the proportion of women execs at the best company to work for in India according to this year's survey, Infosys (17 per cent). It is also higher than the number of women managers at Hindustan Lever Ltd (180, out of a total of 1,480). True, women have traditionally preferred services companies-especially financial services ones-over manufacturing, marketing, and infotech ones. Still, 33 per cent is right up there.

My luck seems to have changed: I meet with Executive Director Kalpana Morparia a day before she is to travel to Singapore. She joined ICICI as a senior assistant 26 years ago, and says she never felt the need to move. ''It is your intellect and ability to deliver that are the determining factors for career-growth at ICICI.'' Morparia's views are echoed by Executive Director Chanda Kochhar who is vehement in her opinion that ICICI is a ''true equal-opportunities employer''. ''The company's growth has thrown up new opportunities, and each time, the organisation has looked for the right person for the job.''

If ICICI (and I use that monicker loosely, to refer to all its divisions, subsidiaries, and joint ventures) is a meritocracy, then some credit for that should go to the man who started the trend, N. Vaghul, and the one who institutionalised it, K.V. Kamath. This approach has largely been gender neutral. That means women aren't given special privileges and there isn't a quota that needs to be filled with respect to the number of women hired or promoted. Explains Renuka Ramnath, CEO, ICICI Ventures: ''If I have the willingness and the management believes I have the competence, then the job is mine.''

So, if ICICI doesn't have a target for the number of women it needs to hire each year-statistics show that the company hires between 6-7 men for every 3-4 women it recruits, just about enough to keep the 33:67 sex ratio intact-what can explain the preponderance of women at senior levels? The first, according to Madhabi Puri-Buch, CEO, ICICI Home Finance and ICICI Web Trade, is ''non-transferability, which has played a role in retaining and nurturing female-talent''. Then, there was (and is) ICICI's ability to take trainees and turn them into superior finance pros. That created a corpus of talented men and women. The former, explains one ICICI employee, moved on as the company's salaries used to be much lower than those on offer from foreign banks. ''The women stayed back, making a trade-off between higher salaries and stability.''

The rest went according to the rules of natural selection as applicable to a meritocracy: a large number of ICICI's male executives left (some did make the trade-off between money and job-content and stayed back-they can be found scattered among ICICI's senior management). The women stayed back, and they quickly rose to the top.

Then, there are the small things the organisation does to make its people, both men and women, comfortable working for it. Intense partying, a way-of-life at most financial services companies, is neither encouraged nor discouraged at ICICI. Employees who have to catch up with work on Saturdays can bring their children in to the kids club. Mothers-to-be are taken off mission-critical projects and, if they so desire, transferred to their location of choice if they wish to be closer to their parents.

By now, I am convinced my luck has changed. Lalita Gupte, ICICI's Joint Managing Director, is back from New York and has her own take on things. ''It is not just a place that provides equal opportunity; it also mentors women who need to make a choice between career and home." Gupte herself received some mentoring-from then Executive Director, S.S. Nadkarni, when she was going through a difficult pregnancy and was considering quitting.

Can the organisation retain this flexibility as it grows bigger? Most women managers think so, and as one of them, Kochhar, puts it, the company shouldn't have a problem as long as women continue to take on more responsibilities, like they have. ''We haven't worked any less.''