This year, as International Women’s Day approaches, I am bombarded with the usual array of celebratory discounts, optimistic story ideas, and statistics suggesting things might just be looking up for female professionals. But is it truly so?
In this age, an increasing number of women in the workforce is no longer a sufficient metric. Rather, their progress through the corporate ladder is pertinent—and the numbers do not tell an uplifting story.
A 2025 McKinsey & Co survey of 77 domestic companies found that while the male-to-female ratio of university students is near parity, women hold one in three entry-level positions. The drop at the first promotion stage is known as the “broken rung”—and women make up just 24% at the managerial level, 20% at the board level, and only 17% in the C-suite. A Great Place to Work India report also finds that a mere 8% of Indian CEOs are women, meaning the corporate ladder for women often resembles a funnel. However, the report also points out that while the attrition rate for entry-level female employees is 1.3 times that of their male counterparts, female senior VPs are less likely to leave.
Myth of Aspiration
These numbers cannot be seen in isolation. A recent KPMG report highlights why this trajectory persists. While 79% of female employees aspire to leadership roles, only 1% occupy a board-level position; just 28% believe the promotion process is fair and transparent, and 65% identify the mid-career stage as the point of highest attrition for women, often driven by pressure to balance child-rearing with organisational expectations. The report states that “women’s exits are rarely driven by declining aspiration; instead, they reflect accumulated organisational frictions, role design constraints, and uneven support during critical transitions”.
These frictions manifest in structural and cultural biases, as well as pay disparities. A 2024 Deloitte report found that 40% of Indian female employees experienced non-inclusive behaviour, including being spoken over in meetings, having their ideas ignored, or being excluded from decision-making. A 2026 TeamLease study found women in corporate India earn roughly 25-30% less than men in comparable roles—the gap widens to ~28% at leadership levels.
Meanwhile, a 2025 Ipsos survey found that 64% of Indians believe that in the ‘overambitious’ push for gender equality, men are being discriminated against.
Failure of Tokenism
All signs point to a structural lacuna where women are not presented with a level playing field and must survive in the system to thrive in it. However, statistics show that the survivors do not necessarily enjoy the spoils of their disproportionate efforts—even when aided by policy interventions.
Take the 2014 Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements Regulations by the Securities and Exchange Board of India: the regulator mandated all listed companies appoint at least one woman director, later requiring the top 1,000 listed firms to include an independent woman director. A 2025 study puts its impact into perspective: While 97% of National Stock Exchange-listed companies now have at least one woman director on their board, just 10% are executive directors and only 6% are chairpersons.
Within this group, 67% belong to promoter families, making tokenism a painful reality as women are placed on boards without real authority to influence decision-making. The imbalance also manifests in the glass cliff phenomenon—the tendency for women to be elevated to leadership positions when organisations are already in crisis—think Elon Musk appointing Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X following a tumultuous restructuring. A University of Exeter study corroborates this, finding women more likely to be appointed to leadership during periods of organisational decline.
Female professionals must navigate bias at every stage of their careers—and even after surviving a skewed system, they may find themselves set up for failure while the world around them believes enough has already been done to level the playing field. Perhaps instead of discounts and token celebrations, what is needed is something far simpler: empathy within the professional ecosystem—not just a level playing field, but recognition that women are capable players.