If women are equally ambitious, why do so few reach the top in India Inc?

On a day when institutions across the world celebrate the promise of women’s leadership, a new study has delivered a sobering reminder for India Inc:The glass ceiling may not be sustained by lack of ambition but by how leadership itself is designed.

A study released by global professional services firm Aon plc on March 5 suggests that the persistent gender gap in senior leadership across corporate India is rooted less in individual aspirations and more in systemic choices, such as who gets access to the most powerful roles, who is trusted with revenue responsibility, and who is allowed to build influence within the corporate hierarchy.

Drawing on responses from 1,500 leaders across more than 30 Indian cities, including over 400 women, the report titled Gender and Leadership at India Inc. raises an uncomfortable question for the country’s boardrooms: if women want leadership as much as men do, why do they reach it far less often?

Ambition is not the problem, structure might be

For decades, the narrative around women’s leadership has often been framed around confidence, risk-taking, or career choices. The Aon study challenges that assumption.

The data indicate that women and men report comparable levels of ambition and share similar career motivations, purpose, growth opportunities, and leadership culture. Yet the trajectories diverge dramatically over time.

According to the study, men aged 50 and above in leadership positions were far more likely to have built their careers within a single organisation, benefiting from structured career pathways, predictable promotion systems, and consistent access to high-impact assignments.

Women’s journeys look markedly different

By the age of 50, only 20 percent of women had advanced within the same organisation, compared with 49 percent of men, the report found. Instead, women were more likely to move between companies in search of opportunity. On average, women recorded 4.13 career transitions compared with 3.17 among men.

What does this reveal about corporate systems?

If men can rise within institutions while women must often leave them to progress, the question becomes unavoidable: are leadership pipelines designed to favour continuity for some and reinvention for others?

The leadership roles women rarely receive

The research highlights another structural imbalance, access to roles that prepare executives for the very top.

In corporate leadership, profit-and-loss responsibility, revenue management, and sales leadership are widely recognised as the proving grounds for CEOs and senior executives. Yet these roles remain disproportionately male.

The study reveals that:

• 68 percent of women leaders reported having P&L experience, compared with 91 percent of men
• Only 45 percent of women had held sales roles, compared with 90 percent of men

Instead, women are more likely to be positioned in enabling functions, areas such as HR, communications, legal, or support operations that are critical to organisations but less frequently serve as launchpads for executive leadership.

Nearly 49 percent of women leaders work in enabling roles, compared with 37 percent of men. Among leaders under the age of 35, the gap is even sharper: 38 percent of women versus 22 percent of men.

The implication is significant. When early career roles determine leadership pipelines, the absence of women in core commercial positions can quietly shape leadership outcomes decades later.

When systems appear fair but feel different

Beyond roles and promotions lies another challenge, perception and trust. Many organisations describe their policies as gender-neutral. Yet the study suggests that the experience of those systems varies sharply between men and women.

Men consistently reported higher levels of confidence in the fairness of pay and promotion decisions. While most leaders said their organizations value diversity, 84 percent of men believed leadership decisions were unbiased, compared with 65 percent of women, a 19-point perception gap.

The divide becomes more visible when leaders are asked about organisational responses to gender bias. Thirty-four percent of women rated their company’s action against gender bias as average or inadequate, compared with 17 percent of men.

For organisations seeking to build inclusive workplaces, these numbers raise a critical concern: when the perception of fairness diverges, institutional credibility begins to erode.

The invisible architecture of leadership

Corporate conversations around gender diversity often focus on representation targets, mentorship programmes or workplace flexibility.

Yet the findings suggest that the deeper question may lie elsewhere: who is given the assignments that shape future CEOs?

Leadership pipelines are not neutral structures. They are built through decisions about stretch projects, sales exposure, market responsibility, and strategic visibility. If these experiences are distributed unevenly, leadership outcomes inevitably follow.

This raises several questions for India’s corporate leaders:

• Are organisations tracking who receives commercially critical assignments?
• Who is entrusted with revenue ownership early in their careers?
• How transparent are promotion and succession pathways?
• And perhaps most importantly, who gets the chance to fail, learn and return stronger?

These questions are rarely captured in diversity reports but often determine who eventually occupies corner offices.

A Women’s Day reflection for India Inc

On International Women’s Day, conversations around empowerment often celebrate individual achievement, the exceptional woman who broke barriers. But the Aon study subtly shifts the lens from individual resilience to institutional responsibility.

If women must change companies more frequently to grow, if they are less likely to hold revenue-generating roles, and if trust in leadership systems remains uneven, then the challenge may not be motivation.

It may be architecture. The future of leadership diversity in India may therefore depend less on encouraging women to “lean in” and more on asking organisations to rethink how power, opportunity and experience are distributed.

Until then, the leadership gap may persist, not because women aspire less, but because the pathways to power remain unevenly mapped.
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