Citi announced it is promoting 306 employees to managing director — a group that levels up the bank’s diversity, particularly along gender lines.
Women comprise 34.6% of the class, an increase of more than 5 percentage points over last year’s group. Seventy of the 241, or 29%, of the employees who made managing director in 2020 were women.
Additionally, the bank said Monday, 35.3% of U.S.-based members of the class are Black, Latinx or Asian.
"As much as the promotion to Managing Director is a recognition of performance and potential, it is even more about driving progress," Citi CEO Jane Fraser said in a memo Monday seen by Business Insider and Bloomberg.
Fraser is the most obvious example of Citi’s commitment to putting women in positions of influence. This marks the bank's first round of managing director promotions with Fraser as CEO — a role she took in March.
Citi in 2018 said it sought for women to comprise at least 40% of its assistant vice president through managing director levels companywide by the end of 2021.
And while this year’s managing director class falls short of that goal, Citi’s gender breakdown puts it ahead of another large U.S. bank that last month announced its own promotions to managing director.
Goldman Sachs named 643 new managing directors in November and heralded the class as its most diverse ever. Women make up 30% of the bank’s most recently named managing directors, up from 29% in 2019, the last year Goldman made such promotions.
About 28% of Goldman’s newly named managing directors are Asian. That compares with 26% in the 2019 class. About 5% are Black worldwide and another 5% are Hispanic or Latinx. That is up from 4% and 2% among 2019’s new managing directors.
Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are expected to announce their own raft of promotions to managing director in January, according to Business Insider. JPMorgan is slated to make a similar move in April.