This third edition of “Mind the Gender Gap” (the The first issue was published in March 2023 and the second in December 2024) goals to attract attention to the problem and function a resource for creating dialogue between policymakers, regulators and industry. In this context, while the capital markets regulator is answerable for developing regulations resembling the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) framework, it will be significant to find out how these measures can be implemented on the bottom.
In May 2021, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) released the BRSR framework, a comprehensive set of sustainability disclosures on environmental, social and governance issues. In this report, we analyze BRSR disclosure data for 300 firms across three reporting periods: fiscal yr (FY) 2022-23, FY 2023-24, and FY 2024-25. Our sample selection methodology is designed to offer a comprehensive representation and canopy roughly 70% of the whole market capitalization of listed firms in India. This approach ensures that the study includes probably the most significant firms while covering the broader market across different sectors and industries.
This report is meant for each regulators and investors as input for simpler, evidence-based regulatory decisions and as an efficient tool for an investor’s evaluation process. By tracking trends over time and examining how the reported data is translated into practice, this third edition goals to advance the impact on meaningful gender inclusion. For example, despite strong growth in the whole workforce during this era, the proportion of girls within the workforce in our sample declined between fiscal yr 2022-23 and financial yr 2024-25, suggesting that inclusion has not kept pace with expansion.
When we analyze gender participation at the manager level of firms, we discover that ladies’s participation on the Board of Directors (BoD) level is between 18% and 19% for your entire financial yr 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25. However, women are least represented among the many Key Managerial Personnel (KMP): for each seven male KMPs we had fewer than one female KMP. Almost two thirds of the sample firms don’t have a female KMP. Additionally, female directors earn significantly lower than their male counterparts, with male director compensation being 3.6 times higher than female director compensation. And that pay gap has widened during the last three years.
In some sectors resembling information technology, finance and consumer discretionary, the proportion of girls within the workforce is higher, typically between 23% and 34%, in comparison with other sectors resembling communication services, energy, industrials, materials, real estate and utilities, where the proportion of girls ranges from 4% to fifteen%. Even lower are the utilities, materials and energy sectors, where only 4-6% women make up the workforce, and these are also where a number of the largest pay disparities exist at the manager level. Overall, total employment at our sample firms increased by greater than 1 million between fiscal yr 2022-23 and financial yr 2024-25, but female representation only accounted for about 18% of this extra increase.
There is critical need for improvement in several areas. For example, firms need to enhance compensation disclosure. Additional granularity of information provided on employees, for instance based on hierarchy or roles they perform, together with clear definitions of what those job levels mean, will significantly improve quality evaluation and actionable insights. We have observed that the definition of KMP varies greatly from company to company and this variation can result in inconsistent results. We recommend issuing guidelines on the classification of KMP and clarifying who ought to be included on this category. This standardization would make the comparison more consistent and useful, each for evaluation and for possible corrective actions to realize pay equity.
Beyond board diversity, there may be a necessity to enhance diversity inside senior management. SEBI has already mandated that firms should have a minimum of one female independent director on company boards. Now it will be significant to think and discuss at board level easy methods to increase the representation of girls within the KMP, which has to this point lagged behind and has the bottom proportion of girls. Additionally, regarding compensation disclosure, we recommend further granularity throughout the board and KMP on the job level to grasp the numerous difference in compensation between men and ladies.
In education, there may be a transparent gap between the number of girls enrolled in higher education and the opportunities available to them within the labor market. For example, in response to data released by the Indian government in 2024, women now make up 43% of all students in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) programs at the upper education level.[1] Similarly, in response to the All India Survey on Higher Education, a report by the Indian Ministry of Education for 2021-22, the variety of female students in higher education institutions in India reached an all-time high of 20.7 million, with women comprising 48% of the whole students.[2] The report also highlights that total doctoral student enrollments (men and ladies combined) increased by 81.2% between 2014-15 and 2021-22, however the variety of female doctoral students greater than doubled over the identical period. Women now make up 46% of all recent registrations.
Indian firms are making progress in disclosing useful information on gender participation within the workforce through BRSR of their annual reports. We imagine such disclosure is the primary and crucial step in making real progress on gender parity, where there continues to be much to be done. However, our evaluation also suggests that disclosures remain inconsistent – particularly for leadership categories resembling BoD and KMP, where definitions and methodologies vary from company to company. The report’s findings highlight the necessity for more consistent reporting practices to enable meaningful comparisons and accountability.
In a rustic where women face significant barriers each in and out of doors of the workplace, we hope our follow-up report, together with our previous work and the work of others, will spark a discussion that ultimately results in workplaces becoming more diverse and inclusive for girls.
