India Inc has miles to travel on diversity and inclusion: Mint analysis
India’s largest publicly-traded companies employ three men for every woman in their workforce, indicating a wide, persistent gap despite growing corporate clamour about diversity. The 94 companies on the BSE 100 index that have reported this data had an aggregate 25.9% women on their staff as of 31 March 2023, a Mint analysis of their latest annual reports showed. A clear trend over time isn’t clear as many companies had not reported comparable data earlier.
That’s because 2022-23 was the first year when stronger sustainability- and diversity-related disclosures became mandatory for India’s top 1,000 listed firms. Still, around half of these companies reported the data in each of the last three financial years, among which the share inched up from 24.6% in 2021 to 27.9% in 2023. The analysis relies on the numbers of permanent and non-permanent staff, and excludes workers.
Women have stayed on the margins of the formal workforce, bogged down by demands and stereotypes of the traditional patriarchal society. Even as norms evolve, rules made to bring and keep women in the workforce are sometimes having unintended consequences. For example, legal obligations such as paid maternity leave of six months might deter a section of employers from hiring women, said Lakshmi Ramachandran, partner, labour laws, JSA Advocates and Solicitors.
Such reasons can affect smaller companies even more. Women have relatively better representation—though still far from parity—in information technology (IT) (35%) and financial services (23%), the analysis showed. Metals and mining, chemicals, power, and auto trailed with less than 10% share.
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