The number of corporate board seats held by women across India has increased gradually over the past five years leaving them holding over 18% of the seats last year, a Deloitte report said on Friday on the occasion of the International Women’s Day.

The “Women in the boardroom: A global perspective” report, however, said that India’s tally is still 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. This includes 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 shows a gradual increase in the number of board seats held by women across India over the years as they held over 18% of the seats in 2023, up from 17.1% in 2021 and 13.8% in 2018, said the report.

In contrast, the global average rose 3.6% on an annual basis to 23.3% in 2023, reducing the timeline towards achieving boardroom gender 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. While the average stayed the same for men at 1.20. This further indicates a low pipeline of women leaders and stresses on the need to create a larger pool of women leaders with varied skill sets.

Although India saw a decline in women board chair positions in 2023, with only 4.1% chairing boards as compared to 4.5% in 2018. The country also witnessed an increase in the number of women taking up CEO roles to 5.1% in 2023 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.

Source: Bizz Buzz