Mid-career women leaders are India's missed opportunity

Experienced, capable, and driven by a sense of purpose, women belong at the centre of our governance discussions

- Aarti Madhusudan & Kakul Misra

Women hold 21% of board seats in India's listed companies. Yet in 97% of those companies, it stops at a single woman director, according to a 2024 Deloitte report, Women in the Boardroom. Progress on paper, perhaps, but rarely a meaningful shift in decision-making power. The real question isn't whether women are ready to lead, it's whether our systems are prepared to rethink what leadership should mean.

Leadership pipelines don't fracture at the top; they thin out in the middle. At the entry level, women make up 34% of India's workforce. By mid-management, that figure drops to 19%. And at the C-suite? A mere 17% (DivHersity Benchmarking Report 2023-2024). The issue isn't a scarcity of talent, but systems designed to reward linear careers, legacy networks and inherited hierarchies. These power structures endure not for lack of alternatives, but because familiarity feels lower risk. Boards tend to replicate what they know, because it's predictable.

Women in the mid-career phase consistently report being overqualified for mentorship programmes yet excluded from decision-making spaces. They're expected to be grateful for flexibility, though influence remains out of reach. This often means being assigned caretaker roles that don't lead to strategic oversight, or being passed over for high-stakes assignments on the assumption that personal priorities will conflict.