Top business roles need greater gender diversity
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A recently-released report by Grant Thornton, Women in Business 2021, places India in third position worldwide—after the Philippines and South Africa—on the count of women in senior management roles. According to its findings, our companies are likelier to have a woman running either the entire business or a significant function of it than firms in most other countries. Last year’s Egon Zehnder Global Board Diversity Tracker reported that India had improved on gender diversity in company boards over the eight years from 2012 to 2020. If these trends are true, they augur well for Indian enterprise. After all, a Harvard Business School report of 2018 said a study had found a clear correlation between women in leadership positions and corporate profitability. Though theories exist of why gender-balanced businesses perform better, we need not prove any causation to accept its value. Indeed, in a world where male privilege is so taken for granted that men in authority scarcely even seem conscious of it, gender parity is a worthy aim in and of itself. Some progress has been made. But is our work done? Far from it.