Number of board seats held by women in India Inc. increased over past 5 years to 18%: Report

The number of board seats held by women across India Inc. has increased gradually over the past five years with them holding 18.3% of board seats in 2023, a Deloitte report said on Friday.

The ‘Women in the boardroom: A global perspective’ report, however, said it is lower than the global average of 23.3%.

The report by the Deloitte Global Boardroom Program analysed more than 18,000 companies in 50 countries exploring the representation of women in the boardroom, including an analysis of 400 companies from India.

“Boardroom diversity requires a paradigm shift. Since many companies prefer to recruit board members with CEO or CFO experience, these numbers do not paint an optimistic outlook for pipeline development. India Inc. must break from historical patterns and prioritise capabilities over past roles,” Deloitte South Asia Chairperson Shefali Goradia said.

The report, released on International Women’s Day, showed a gradual increase in the number of board seats held by women across India Inc., with women holding 18.3% of board seats in 2023, up from 13.8% in 2018, and 17.1% in 2021.

India’s number is lower than the global average of 23.3%, which has seen an increase of 3.6% since 2022, reducing the timeline towards achieving parity by seven years—from 2045 to 2038.

“This indicates that even if India were to match the global pace, achieving gender parity on boards would still remain a distant goal until a robust pipeline of women leaders is developed,” the report said.

Goradia said by nurturing governance expertise creatively and regularly evaluating the progress, a robust pipeline of talented women leaders can be cultivated for a brighter future in corporate governance.

Deloitte Global has developed the “stretch factor,” a research tool that measures the average number of board seats an individual holds in a particular market. The higher the stretch factor, the more seats are held by any single director in a given market.

The stretch factor among women in India increased to 1.32 in 2023 as compared to 1.30 in 2021.

The average stayed the same for men at 1.20, which further indicates a low pipeline of women leaders and stresses the need to create a larger pool of women leaders with varied skill sets.

Although India saw a decline in board chairs held by women in 2023, with only 4.1% of women chairing boards as compared to 4.5% in 2018, it witnessed an increase in the number of women taking up CEO roles—5.1% female CEOs against 3.4% in 2018.

In India, sectoral trends paint an optimistic picture of women's representation across boardrooms. All of the sectors examined in the survey showed an increase in the number of women on boards in 2023 as against 2018.

The life sciences and healthcare sector is topping the chart with 21.3% of women on company boards, followed by technology, media and telecommunications (20.5%), consumer business (19.7%), manufacturing (17.4%), and financial services (16.9%), the report said.