India Inc wants more women in leadership roles

India Inc is pushing for more women at the top.

Companies including Accenture, Cognizant, KPMG, L&T, PwC, and NatWest Group are making concerted efforts to bring in more women in leadership roles, recognising that diverse viewpoints are crucial to fostering innovation and better decision-making, ultimately leading to more success and better profitability for firms.

For professional services firm Accenture, the current gender metrics in India are industry-leading - women constitute approximately 47% of the workforce and nearly 26% of leadership roles.

"At Accenture, we embrace diversity as a source of innovation and competitive advantage, and believe that an equal workplace culture that inspires, advances and empowers women is critical to create enduring 360°value for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities," said Lakshmi C, lead - HR, Accenture in India. "We follow a right role/client, right skill and right behaviours approach to create intentional career advancement opportunities for high potential women into leadership roles."

Women hold some of Accenture's key executive leadership roles, including Chair and CEO, CFO, CHRO and CMO. It was among the first companies to set itself a global goal of becoming gender-balanced by 2025; in addition to having 30% women in leadership levels (managing directors and above).

At NatWest Group, around 22% of leadership roles are held by women with an organisation-wide balance of close to 40%.

"Our commitment to hire, train and mentor more women for leadership roles is a priority and we have a gender-slate that publishes data against objectives for regular reviews with key stakeholders," said Maneesh Menda, head of HR, International Hubs. It has an India Inclusion Council with a workstream dedicated to gender balance across all levels in the organisation.

Various initiatives including inclusion councils, coaching, mentoring and sponsorship, second-career programmes, developmental and career acceleration opportunities are helping companies steadily boost gender diversity at senior levels.

KPMG in India has 40%gender diversity at leadership level and has seen a sustained growth in these numbers over the past years.

"Of the partners and associate partners promoted in 2023, about 20% were women. We continue to approach our efforts on diversity with intentionality and inclusivity and have set ourselves a target to have women in 29% of the leadership roles by 2025," said Sunit Sinha, head of people, performance and culture.

Women make up 35% of PwC India's workforce and 20% of the senior leadership roles in the firm. These figures represent a year-on-year improvement. "We have a sharp focus on the representation of women at the leadership level combined with substantive action and are happy that it is helping drive an inclusive culture and developing a robust and sustainable pool of talented female professionals," said Shirin Sehgal, deputy people officer, PwC India.

Indian multinational conglomerate L&T has many initiatives to mentor and transition women in senior leadership roles while diversified miner Vedanta's ESG goals for FY30 include having 40% women at the leadership (GM and above) level and 30% at the decision-making level. It currently has 28% women at the decision-making and leadership levels compared to about 15% three years ago, said CHRO Madhu Srivastava.

Earlier this month, Cognizant appointed six women - some promotions, some new hires -- to senior vice-president roles, as part of its focus on increasing diverse talent overall, including in leadership positions.

"Advancing diversity must be systemic, woven into everything we do," Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S said in a statement.