Panama’s state-owned Banco Nacional de Panamá (BNP) is emerging as a regional case study in how a financial institution can move gender equity from corporate rhetoric into measurable, audited practice. According to its 2025 Sustainability Report, women make up 55% of the bank’s workforce and hold 55% of managerial positions — results that earned the institution the Gender Equality Seal for Public Institutions from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
What Happened
The audited 2025 figures show a workforce of 3,543 employees: 1,961 women (55%) and 1,582 men (45%). Parity extends well beyond entry-level roles. Of the bank’s female managers, 76% head bank branches across the country, ensuring financial decision-making in the regions reflects diverse leadership.
Training data also points to deliberate investment in female talent: women received an average of 55.7 hours of annual training in 2025, compared with 46.7 hours for men, and 2,074 employees — 54.5% of the payroll — completed a specialized gender equality module.
Salary monitoring shows minimal or nonexistent gaps in the categories analyzed: a ratio of 0.98 for executives and managers, 1.00 and 1.06 for middle management, and 0.94 for analysts.
Carlos Carrasco, manager of Responsible and Sustainable Management at BNP, explains that the strategy does not depend on individual goodwill or temporary campaigns but on a permanent supervision chain: a Corporate Governance and Sustainability Steering Committee at the highest level, a Gender Equality Working Commission attached to the executive ESG committee, and a dedicated Department of Inclusion and Gender Equality with full-time leadership.
The bank also published a Gender Equality Guide requiring job postings to use neutral, role-focused language — for example, “the person who occupies the teller position” — to eliminate unconscious recruitment bias. An independent, confidential Digital Ethics Line and an Ethics and Conduct Committee handle reports of harassment or gender bias.
The strategy rests on five pillars: training, awareness campaigns, recognition through the “Women Who Inspire” awards, territorial economic empowerment, and financial products. The empowerment pillar includes the Raíces program, which has graduated more than 70 women from the agricultural sector and vulnerable communities across three editions, and Crece Mujer, launched with Voces Vital to decentralize training to the provinces. In finance, the bank launched Agro Mujer, a preferential-conditions product financing women-led ventures in agriculture and agroindustry.
Background
In Latin America’s financial sector, gender equity has often been reduced to corporate speeches or isolated initiatives each March, around International Women’s Day. The BNP case stands out precisely because it applies international measurement and accountability standards, allowing results to be independently audited rather than merely announced.
The UNDP Gender Equality Seal for Public Institutions is the external benchmark recognizing this work. The bank’s approach also addresses a structural problem in Panama and the region: the limited access women have historically had to decision-making positions.
The human dimension is visible in leaders such as Zoila María Díaz, manager of the BNP branch in 24 de Diciembre, who completed her master’s degree three years ago while balancing roles as a professional, mother, wife and daughter. She describes breastfeeding protection as non-negotiable, noting the bank has a lactation room at its headquarters and enforces lactation hours in branches.
Psychologist Román Emiliani argues that effective equality policy must translate into clear, supervised regulations, with three indispensable elements: communication that ensures staff genuinely understand the rules, active supervision of code-of-conduct compliance, and reliable confidential reporting channels that prevent revictimization.
What This Means for Panama
The BNP experience demonstrates that gender equality can be embedded in a financial institution’s sustainability strategy and linked to business objectives rather than treated as a side initiative. The bank has set targets through 2028, along with tracking mechanisms and financial products designed for different sectors and territories.
Challenges remain. Carrasco notes that women’s professional advancement is still conditioned by unequal distribution of domestic and care work at home, making shared responsibility — through parental leave or awareness campaigns — essential to sustaining equity long term. Both Carrasco and Díaz identify continuous, personalized training for men and women as a need to close remaining gaps.
Scalability is another test: the Crece Mujer program drew 937 applicants for just 87 spots, showing that demand for financial and technical support among Panamanian women far exceeds current supply and pointing to the need for broader strategic alliances.
For Panama’s wider business ecosystem, the case raises a question that goes beyond participation statistics: what happens when gender equity becomes part of an institution’s decisions, management and services — linking inclusion, economic activity and social development?
This story was originally reported by La Prensa.