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Citi Celebrates International Women’s Day with Empowerment Events to “#BreakTheBias”

By Yuka Izumi / Isao Kojima, Citi Women Co-Champions April 19, 2022 10:30 AM

Every year Citi holds events with a shared theme in offices around world to celebrate International Women Day (March 8). This year’s theme was “BreakTheBias”. Since March 8, many of our colleagues have joined Citi women empowerment events in Japan and overseas. In Japan, Citi Women hosted a speaker session on March 23. We were honored to welcome Yuki Ide, co-representative and co-founder of Sharedine, as guest speaker. More than 200 colleagues attended the event. Separately, the Markets Division organized a Power Walk in which groups of two women and one senior enjoyed an informal chat while walking around the Imperial Palace.

Chairman Fumiaki Kurahara gave the opening address at Citi Women’s speaker session. In her speech, Ide-san shared the internal conflict she experienced behind her success, and gave her thoughts on topics ranging from challenges to career development that women are not good at dealing with to work and personal life decisions at different life stages. In our post-session survey, participants with varied individual circumstances said that they found Ide-san’s advice to be very useful. Ide-san’s speech reinforced our view that sharing different perspectives with all our colleagues, whether they are women or men, raising children or taking care of elderly parents, will lead to a more inclusive workplace and help remove gender as an obstacle to career progress.

The Power Walk provided an opportunity for women working in the Markets Division, which has a higher ratio of men, to build relationships with senior leaders. Japan CCO Lee Waite joined the walk. Lee previously worked in the Markets Division and has often said that there is an “apprenticeship” aspect to our business: our colleagues learn a lot from working alongside senior leaders in the office and receiving advice from them. Citi Women also hosts mentorship programs and lunch gatherings for employees raising children and providing care to elderly relatives throughout the year. We hope these activities contribute to a deep-rooted culture of learning and supporting each other across divisions at Citi.

Diversity initiatives are strategic priority for Citi management. Recently, Citi announced that it had exceeded firm-wide diversity representation goals and made progress in the area of hiring, retaining, developing and promoting women. In Japan, the percentage of women in positions from assistant vice president (AVP) to managing director (MD) increased 0.7pt in 2021 to 38.5%,. Last year, Citi joined the "Group of Male Leaders Who Will Create a Society in which Women Shine”, a group supported by the Cabinet Office to raise awareness of the issue of female representation among men and encourage them to take appropriate measures improve it. At the same, we are constantly reviewing and updating our welfare benefits to reflect the various health and life needs of our colleagues.

By listening to and leaning from each other we can overcome unconscious bias/change stereotypes and move in the direction of a more inclusive workplace and society. There is still a lot more we can do to make an impact through our actions and conversations. Citi Women will continue to set aspirational goals and work towards them.