With International Women’s Day on March 8, 2026, Biji SS, Senior General Manager and Head of Branch Banking at South Indian Bank, has one message for every woman navigating the tension between ambition and guilt: you are not "allowed" to work. You choose to work. And the difference matters more than you think.
Thirty years ago, a young woman walked into a branch of South Indian Bank as a probationary officer. She was handed ledgers so heavy that they required help just to carry. The year was 1996, and the concept of a gender-agnostic workplace—though not yet called that—was, she would later discover, already alive inside the institution she had joined. Her name is Biji SS, and she has spent three decades proving that meritocracy, not gender, is the only yardstick that matters.
Today, she oversees Branch Banking—a vertical of 6,500 people, hundreds of products, and the entire retail heartbeat of one of Kerala's most storied banks. She moved here after heading Corporate Banking, a world of AAA-rated companies and sophisticated mandates. "Corporate Banking had 100 people," she says. "Branch Banking has 6,500 people." In effect, every single South Indian Bank branch comes under her. The scale demanded a shift in thinking. The mission, however, remained the same: serve people well.
Beating the broken rung
Her journey was far from linear. From probation officer to branch manager took eight years—a gap that is often referred to as the "broken rung." It is the quiet career plateau that derails many women, not because of external barriers, but because of internal ones: guilt, caregiving obligations, the weight of a society that mistakes domestic labour for a woman's defining identity. "Everywhere, you are haunted with the guilt," she says. "It's not required."
Biji speaks of guilt with the authority of someone who has lived it. She prepared her resignation letter hundreds of times, something that many women have gone through, and understand. But her resilience won over.
She recalls how she drove 40 kilometres at dawn to drop her son off at her mother's home, returned to the office by opening time, and ran her branch. A 'Don't Quit' sign in her kitchen kept her anchored on the hardest days. "Grit and resilience," she says, is what kept her going. She was not saying this as a platitude, but as operational advice. Something she lived through.
And central to that resilience, she insists, is something deceptively simple: asking for help. It is, she observes, the one thing women are least likely to do, and most in need of. Men have no qualms about asking for help, and they get it. This reluctance to ask for help in women is not weakness, it is conditioning. Society has long framed the working woman as someone who has been granted permission to have a career, which means she must compensate—be the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect employee—all at once, without complaint and without request. But you can break the cycle.
"You need to have a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C," Biji says. "Wherever it is possible, just get help." In practice, that has meant calling on relatives, neighbours, and, on occasion, waking before sunrise to solve a problem before the working day begins. The goal is not superhuman self-sufficiency, she notes, but it is the radical act of building a support system and actually using it. Once a woman stops seeing a request for help as an admission of failure, she argues, the career path ahead becomes considerably less obstructed.
But asking for help only works when there is someone willing to give it, and Biji is candid that family alignment is not a soft consideration. It is a strategic prerequisite. Before you accept a promotion, before agreeing to a transfer, before raising your hand for a leadership role, you must have an honest conversation at home. And this is gender-agnostic. "The first thing that you should do is discuss this with the family members," she says. "At the end of the day, it is going to benefit all of us." That may mean a spouse requesting a transfer of their own, schools being changed, or the family reorganising itself around a new geography. None of it is easy, and Biji does not pretend otherwise. But she is equally firm on what happens when that support is absent: don't go. Wait. The window will come. "You then wait for the time when you are able to manage everything and move." It is advice that sounds conservative until you understand it as the opposite, a refusal to let an unsupported leap undo years of careful progress, especially in fields like banking. "You may not be able to do justice to your career" without support systems, and this goes for both genders.
On Women's Day, her message strips away sentimentality. Empowerment is not something bestowed, says Biji. "We are already empowered. The real challenges are the blockades. When you successfully overcome these internal blockades, it's just free-flowing." The real work, she says, is systemic: changing the expectation that a working woman is somehow a woman who has been given permission to work. When a woman identifies as a breadwinner—not just a banker, in her case—the guilt begins to loosen its grip.
South Indian Bank has institutionalised this thinking. It's 'Her' series of products, under Biji, nudges women to build assets, be it property, vehicles, or businesses, in their own names. Forty-six per cent of the bank's workforce is women, and approximately 180 branches are staffed entirely by women. SIB also has a staff welfare scheme for women over and above the maternity leave benefits. New mothers can take a break of two years for childcare, return to work, and start exactly where they left off. At senior levels (senior general manager), women such as Biji hold 30 per cent of positions.
“Anything that you do, do it with your heart. And when you are passionate about your work, the universe will conspire. I am filled with gratitude to all the support systems that have brought me thus far,” reminisced Biji.