MentorMyBoard, the tech platform that has been working towards empowering and enabling directors across Indian boardrooms, announced the third edition of its Women Directors Conclave 2023, to be held on December 15th at the Bombay Stock Exchange. The event is designed to drive awareness and conversations about the contribution of women leaders to building stronger and more resilient boardrooms. The Women Directors Conclave will also host awards to acknowledge and celebrate the best women board leaders in India.
MentorMyBoard has been working towards building performance-driven boardrooms by mentoring, upskilling, and empowering directors and boardroom leaders to create a performance-driven corporate governance ecosystem.
It said that one in every five board members on average in Nifty-500 companies in India is a woman. The Companies Act 2013 which has made it mandatory for Indian companies to have at least one woman director on their boards, was a progressive step towards enhancing gender equity at the board level, but after a decade, the glass is both half full and half empty, it said in a statement.
Divya Momaya, Founder of MentorMyBoard, said, “Today, women directors form 18.5 per cent of the cumulative boardrooms across the country. While this is significant progress from when we started, we still have a long way to go. To put that in context, there are only 885 women directors among the 4783 directors that cumulatively sit on the boards of NIFTY 500 companies. We at MentorMyBoard have identified challenges like limited or no access to the boardrooms, lack of upskilling platforms, and a lack of a supportive network of learning ecosystems. These factors, among others, are hampering aspiring and deserving women leaders to realize their full potential and contribute to nation-building.”
“Through the Women Directors Conclave, we wish to highlight these challenges and drive strong conversations around the need for inclusive leadership in performance-driven boardrooms while also acknowledging and celebrating stellar women directors through our awards, for their achievements and contributions to Indian boardrooms,” she added.
Neha Shah, Co-Founder Director of MentorMyBoard, said, “Given the current geo-political volatility in global business, it is all the more imperative to build robust boardrooms that not only meet the legal mandate but also drive efficiency and performance. And for this, we need to ensure we are able to leverage the complete potential of our human assets, including the brilliance of women directors in boardrooms. This would also be imperative in reaching the GoI’s vision of becoming a $5 trillion economy while building women directors as strong pillars of the futuristic boards of India.”
Speaking at the Women Directors Conclave in 2022, Nirmala Sitharaman acknowledged the crucial role that MentorMyBord is playing in mentoring aspiring women directors for Indian boardrooms and commended them for this initiative. She further added that by helping women to train for the roles in men dominated boardrooms, MentorMyBoard is not only building stronger and diverse, performance driven boards but is also helping bright and capable women cross the threshold of hesitation, that is holding them back.