Female leadership in corporate India - Firm performance and culture
Female leadership in corporate India - Firm performance and culture
Mandate under Companies Act, 2013
Under the Companies Act, 2013, all listed firms in India are required to have at least one woman on their board.
Within a year, the percentage of listed firms without women on board plummeted from 53% to less than 10%.
As of 2021, the average share of women on boards in India stands at 17.1%, lower than the global average of 19.7%, and much lower than the best-performing country, France, with 43.2% (Deloitte, 2022).
Representation of women has increased by nearly 40% between 2010 and 2019.
In FY 2022-23, more than half of the NSE-listed firms in our sample did not have even one woman in their top management teams, and about 10% of firms had exactly one woman.
Linked with companies progress
Having at least one woman on board leads to better economic performance and lower financial risk for large and medium-sized firms.
Further, higher share of women in board positions is positively associated with employee ratings and sentiment scores.
Report analysis
Having mixed-gender boards can lead to greater diversity of thought, which improves the quality of corporate governance
Boards with increasing shares of women are more likely to enact human capital development policies benefiting firm employees, thus potentially improving employee welfare and organisational culture.
Narrowing the Gender Participation Gap
conducted by research and analytics firm Moody’s Analytics
gender labour force participation gaps are narrowing across the world as more women join or rejoin it. This has ***added 1.5 trillion), nearly half can be attributed to India and Japan, two large economies where gender gaps remain wide.
The study identifies labour force participation rate as the proportion of the working-age population (age 20 to 64) that is either employed or actively seeking employment. The gender employment gap, therefore, is a relative disparity in the employment of people of different genders.
“in India’s case, more than four times the US or the EU."
WEF Gender Gap Report, 2025
Pakistan
Pakistan ranks lowest in the Global Gender Gap report. Pakistan’s overall gender parity score declined for the second consecutive year, falling to 56.7 per cent from 57 per cent in 2024. It remains the only country in South Asia to have closed less than 60 per cent of its gender gap. Pakistan saw the steepest decline in the economic domain. According to a 2024 World Bank report, women constitute just 22.8 per cent of the country’s workforce. Their representation in leadership roles remains negligible. The report has now cited a four-point increase in perceived wage inequality, suggesting that even as more women enter the workforce, they continue to face entrenched structural barriers to equal pay and advancement. Pakistan’s score improved by 1.5 percentage points, reaching 85.1 per cent parity, primarily due to a rise in female literacy from 46.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent. The report noted that this progress at the university level was largely due to a decline in male enrollment, rather than a significant increase in female participation. The report also noted a sharp drop in political empowerment, an area Pakistan historically fares the worst. The score in this category fell from 12.2 per cent in 2024 to 11 per cent in 2025. While women’s representation in parliament inched up by 1.2 percentage points, the percentage of women holding ministerial positions fell to zero, down from 5.9 per cent the previous year, leaving Pakistan with no female ministers at the federal level. Print
