Why women leaders are missing from decision-making roles in India

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 and somehow easier to manage. 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.

And while corporate India continues to grapple with this mid-career drain, a deeper crisis persists: entire forms of leadership, rooted in contextual understanding, systems thinking and the ability to navigate high-stakes decisions, are devalued because they don’t conform to traditional codes of authority. In reality, these are actionable skills that are essential to navigating the layered, long-term challenges that organisations face today. What looks like a gender imbalance masks a deeper governance failure. In the social sector, where board-level decisions can determine access to healthcare, education, livelihoods and dignity, the stakes are immediate and tangible. These roles demand a leadership style grounded in accountability, risk awareness and moral clarity.

Yet even in these environments, decision-making on finance, risk, legal and compliance matters are dominated by men. While some women do lead in these critical functions, they remain statistical outliers. More often, women are steered toward roles linked to HR, communications or community engagement, positions valued for soft power rather than strategic authority. The result is a leadership landscape that lacks the full range of insights and experiences needed for resilient, people-centred governance.

Leading the social sector

The social sector is often framed as a space of service, not ambition. The truth is, the sector offers one of the most rigorous tests of leadership there is. Board members are called upon to govern without the comforts of hierarchy, prestige or market dominance. Decisions made here alter the course of people’s lives. The demands of social sector governance require leaders to navigate ambiguity, manage conflict and take decisions where the human consequences are immediate.

For women in their mid-careers, these boards offer rare opportunities to step into consequential leadership roles. They provide the space to influence organisational strategy, hold institutions accountable, and exercise governance oversight. Yet pathways into these roles remain limited. The barriers aren’t a shortage of skill, but the absence of visible, structured, and accessible pipelines.

For experienced women professionals, board roles offer more than a seat; they offer a platform to practise a deeper, broader form of leadership. Board experience cultivates long-term thinking, influence without formal authority and decision-making under uncertainty, qualities essential for senior leadership roles.

It also provides something increasingly rare in corporate structures: the chance to contribute to institutions aligned with one’s values. At a time when India’s development challenges demand urgent, ethical and inclusive leadership, boards that prioritise both skill and service are not an optional extra. They’re essential to the country’s resilience.

As India’s social sector calls for stronger, indigenous leadership and deeper accountability to local communities, broadening these leadership networks is critical. Inviting newer, more diverse voices onto boards strengthens not just the institutions they govern, but the collective leadership ecosystem the sector depends on.

There’s no scarcity of capable women leaders in India. What it lacks are systems willing to rethink who leads and how leadership is measured. As long as decision-making rooms remain dominated by a narrow set of archetypes, the very leadership capacities that could strengthen our institutions will remain marginalised.

This isn’t a theoretical concern. The consequences are tangible as boards built on sameness routinely miss emerging risks, fail to engage with stakeholder realities, and struggle to maintain public legitimacy. During the pandemic, for instance, leadership teams with broader lived experience were faster to anticipate frontline workforce challenges and supply chain disruptions, while others remained blinkered by operational silos. Leadership teams that reflect a broader range of lived experience and governance approaches consistently make better, longer-term decisions. Global evidence confirms it.

If organisations hope to remain resilient and socially credible, expanding the leadership lens is not charity. It’s a strategy. Those mid-career women sidelined by existing structures represent not a lost demographic, but one of India’s greatest untapped opportunities. The conversation now must move to whether institutions have the courage and foresight to evolve and change how and by whom they are led.

Aarti Madhusudan is founder of Governance Counts and is a partner for the Women on Boards initiative at Indian School of Development Management and Kakul Misra is the Director of Strategic Capacity Building at ISDM.

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com