Corporate India’s growth surge leaves women behind as hiring, leadership and pay gaps widen

Corporate India is hiring at scale, expanding payrolls and signalling economic momentum. Yet beneath the surface of this growth story lies a stubborn imbalance: women are still being left behind. A new report by CFA Institute suggests that the country’s corporate expansion has not translated into meaningful progress on gender inclusion, exposing structural barriers that continue to shape India’s labour market.

The third edition of the institute’s report, Mind the Gender Gap: Analysis of Women’s Participation, Pay, and Other Measures in Indian Public Companies, offers one of the most comprehensive snapshots of gender dynamics in corporate India.

Drawing on Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) disclosures from 300 listed companies, collectively accounting for more than 70 percent of India’s market capitalisation, the report paints a sobering portrait: economic growth alone is proving insufficient to close entrenched gender divides.

A hiring surge that largely bypassed women

Between FY 2022–23 and FY 2024–25, the companies analysed collectively added more than one million jobs, representing a workforce expansion of 13.3 percent. Yet women accounted for only about 18 percent of those new hires.

The consequence was paradoxical. Even as companies grew, women’s share of the workforce slipped marginally, from 19.6 percent to 19.4 percent.

The report attributes this stagnation not to temporary economic cycles but to deeper structural barriers within corporate hiring and promotion systems.

The implication is stark: economic growth, often seen as a natural equaliser, may in fact reinforce inequality unless institutions intervene intentionally.

The glass ceiling remains firmly in place

If women’s participation at entry and mid-levels is stagnating, the climb to senior leadership appears even more constrained.

The report shows that women’s representation on corporate boards has remained largely static, hovering between 18 and 19 percent over the past three financial years. While this level reflects compliance with regulatory mandates requiring at least one woman director on listed company boards, it signals little organic progress beyond the minimum threshold.

Among Key Managerial Personnel (KMP)—a category that includes top executives such as CEOs, CFOs, and company secretaries—the change has been modest. Female representation rose from 11.1 percent in FY 2022–23 to 12.4 percent in FY 2024–25.

More striking is the structural absence: Nearly two-thirds of the companies analysed reported having no female KMP at all.

In other words, the upper echelons of corporate leadership remain overwhelmingly male.

The widening pay divide at the top

Pay disparities reinforce the leadership gap. According to the report’s analysis, male directors in FY 2024–25 earned a median remuneration 3.6 times higher than their female counterparts. Three years earlier, that ratio stood at 2.9.

The picture among KMPs is only marginally better. Although the pay gap has narrowed slightly over time, male KMP still earned roughly 70 percent, more than female executives on average.

At lower organisational tiers, employee and worker levels, the gap appears less dramatic. Yet even here, the trend line is troubling. Female-to-male pay ratios declined from 94.6 percent in FY 2022–23 to 88.3 percent in FY 2024–25, suggesting that pay growth has accelerated more rapidly for men. Transparency, the report argues, is critical to confronting this disparity.

Sectoral divides shape national outcomes

The data also reveals how industry dynamics influence gender participation across the economy. Sectors such as information technology, financial services, and consumer discretionary industries continue to show relatively stronger female representation, typically ranging between 23 percent and 34 percent. For years, the IT industry has functioned as a major gateway for women entering corporate careers.

Nevertheless, IT has experienced sluggish recruitment, especially throughout the recent periods of global technological restructuring, and has, therefore, disproportionately affected the overall statistics of female labour.

On the other extreme are those industries that include energy, materials, and utilities, where women make up only 4 to 6 per cent of the employees and where the difference in pay between seniors is one of the largest.

These industry oppositions are used to explain how structural facts in industries, such as workplace culture to educational pipelines, influence gender outcomes in the larger economy.

Between disclosure and accountability

The report states that the growing sustainability disclosure regime in India, especially the BRSR framework, is a potent instrument of reform, provided that companies and regulators shift their focus to compliance and to accountability.

Among its recommendations:

• Standardisation of the definition and classification of key managerial personnel in order to have more consistent reporting between companies.

• Making remuneration disclosures more detailed, as well as having more distinct executive and non-executive roles and hierarchy levels.

• By promoting the use of quantifiable goals for women's representation in leadership on corporate boards.

Increasing the number of hiring, retention, return-to-work, and women leadership development programs, especially in areas that have traditionally experienced low participation.

These the report recommends, would help change disclosure structures into structural change agents.

Growth without inclusion

India’s corporate sector is frequently celebrated as a driver of national growth, innovation and global competitiveness. Yet the Mind the Gender Gap findings raise an uncomfortable question: Who is truly benefiting from this expansion?

The evidence suggests that while companies are growing larger and more profitable, the pathways to leadership, and the rewards that accompany them, remain unevenly distributed.

Until hiring systems, promotion pipelines and boardroom oversight mechanisms are re-engineered with gender inclusion in mind, corporate expansion may continue to widen rather than narrow the divide.

In other words, India’s growth story is real, but its promise of inclusion remains unfinished.

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