Women Hold Rising Shares of CFO and COO Roles. Do They Hold the Mic Too?
The pipeline numbers are, for once, genuinely good news. Data compiled this year shows the pool of women in COO, CFO, and CTO roles in Indian companies has nearly doubled since 2020, and women CEOs in NSE 500 companies crossed 7% in 2025, up from 3% in 2018. For a country that has spent a decade debating whether board quotas actually change anything, this is the closest thing to proof of concept. Women are not just entering the leadership pipeline anymore. They are running finance functions, operations, and technology at companies that move the Indian economy. So here is the less comfortable question: are they being asked to talk about it?
Walk into a fintech summit, a governance roundtable, or a CNBC panel on Q3 earnings season, and the answer gets murkier fast. The women filling these operational C-suite seats are frequently missing from the rooms where the industry explains itself to itself. This piece is about that gap, between who is running the company and who gets handed the microphone to talk about how.
It is a distinct problem from the one usually discussed under "women in leadership" headlines. That conversation tends to stop at the hire, the promotion, the board seat, the appointment announcement. Getting a woman into the COO chair is treated as the finish line. But a title is not the same thing as a public reputation, and in industries built on relationships and credibility, a public reputation is what eventually decides who gets the next board seat, the next advisory role, the next big mandate. If the pipeline is widening at the entry point but narrowing again at the visibility stage, the gains lower down don't compound the way they should.
The Numbers Behind the Headline
Start with what has genuinely shifted. Women now hold 27.1% of Indian board seats as of 2026, up from 18.4% in 2020, with banking leading sector representation at roughly 34%, followed by IT and healthcare. The second edition of the Women Leadership in Corporate India Survey, run by KPMG in India and AIMA, found that women now hold 20% of leadership roles in mid-market companies, up from 13% in 2016, and that the share of organisations with meaningfully low women representation in leadership has shrunk from 54% to 46% over the past two years.
Individual appointments have done more for visibility than any statistic. Priya Nair became the first woman CEO and MD of Hindustan Unilever in the company's 92-year history, effective August 2025, after three decades at the company building brands like Dove and Comfort. Economist Poonam Gupta was appointed Deputy Governor of the RBI. Neither of these is a CFO or COO story specifically, but they mark something real: the ceiling on which functions a woman is allowed to run has moved. Finance, operations, and technology, the functions that used to be considered "safe" male territory precisely because they were seen as unglamorous and technical, are no longer off limits.
It's a pattern we've traced before in other fields, most recently in how visibility lags execution in AI healthcare, where the women actually building the systems were rarely the ones asked to explain them publicly. The finance and operations story is the same shape, playing out in a different industry.
None of this is nothing. But a rising numerator on an org chart does not automatically translate into a rising numerator on a conference agenda, and that is where the story gets more complicated. The KPMG-AIMA survey itself flags this exact disconnect: 79% of women professionals surveyed said they aspire to leadership roles, yet only 1% currently sit at board level. That is not a talent gap. It is a bottleneck somewhere between ambition and recognition, and the speaking circuit is one of the more visible places that bottleneck shows up.
A Seat at the Table Isn't a Seat on the Panel
There is a reason the word "manel" exists at all. Journalist Kalpana Sharma has been raising the same complaint at Indian media and seminar circuits for two decades: organisers default to men not out of malice but because it simply does not occur to them to look elsewhere. That instinct compounds specifically against operational leadership. A CEO or a chief marketing officer is, by the nature of the job, a public-facing role with a communications team built around getting them quoted. A CFO or a COO is often deliberately kept out of the press, treated as an internal-facing function whose job is precision, not narrative. That institutional habit does not disappear just because the person now sitting in the CFO chair is a woman with something worth saying about capital allocation, supply chain resilience, or how finance functions are being rebuilt around AI tooling.
The result is a strange asymmetry. Women are landing operational leadership roles at a faster clip than at any point in Indian corporate history, but the speaking circuit, the panel invites, the "in conversation with" slots at industry summits, still runs largely on old habits about who counts as a spokesperson. A rising COO count doesn't rewire an events organiser's contact list. Someone has to do that work on purpose.
The Media Mirror
It isn't just conference organisers. Look at how Indian business journalism itself treats women as sources, and the pattern holds. The Global Media Monitoring Project, run in India with the Network of Women in Media in India, found that women's presence as sources and subjects in Indian news dropped sharply to 14% across print, TV, and radio, down from 22% in 2010. Within that already-thin slice, women showed up least in the "economy" and "politics and government" categories, the very beats that would put a CFO or a COO in front of a byline, and most in categories tied to gender or celebrity coverage. A woman running a finance function is statistically less likely to be quoted about finance than about almost anything else.
This matters for Draupadi on the Dais specifically because it explains why "just be good at your job and visibility will follow" doesn't hold up as advice. Visibility is not a natural byproduct of competence. It runs through infrastructure, communications teams, press relationships, event Rolodexes, that has historically been built around a narrower idea of who a business spokesperson looks like. Being excellent at running a P&L doesn't insert you into that infrastructure. Somebody has to actively route around the default.
Who Gets Asked, and Why It Skews the Way It Does
Part of the explanation is genuinely structural rather than deliberate. Panels get built off warm contacts and past speakers, which means today's roster tends to reproduce yesterday's roster. A CFO who has never been on a panel is harder for an organiser to picture on one than a CEO who has done the circuit for a decade, even if the CFO would be the sharper voice in the room on, say, working capital discipline in a volatile rate environment. There's also a genre problem: "leadership" panels default to CEOs, "innovation" panels default to CTOs and founders, and there's no equivalently established genre of panel built around what a COO or a CFO uniquely knows, even though operational and financial leaders are often the ones with the most granular, least-spun view of how a company actually works.
This is where the conference panel problem and the operational leadership visibility problem intersect and reinforce each other. It isn't only that women are underrepresented on panels generally, well documented at this point. It's that within the smaller pool of women who do get invited, the invitations cluster around founder and CEO stories, the ones with a clean, marketable arc. A woman CFO's story, "how I restructured the balance sheet during a downturn," "what changed when we brought AI into FP&A," is less obviously packageable as a keynote, even though it is frequently the more substantive story in the room.
There is also a quieter, sector-specific version of this. Banking has the highest share of women on boards among Indian sectors, at roughly 34%, which means finance as an industry has had longer than most to normalise senior women. And yet banking conferences still lean heavily on chief executives and heads of retail or digital banking when they build out their marquee panels, not the CFOs quietly managing balance sheet risk through a volatile rate cycle. Representation at the top of an org chart in a given sector does not automatically translate into representation on that sector's stage, even in the sectors that are furthest ahead numerically.
Globally, the pattern isn't unique to India, though the shape of it differs. A 2026 survey of finance leaders elsewhere found that the pay gap between women and men narrows sharply once a woman actually reaches the CFO seat, suggesting the real barrier sits earlier, in the climb, not at the top. Visibility looks like it might work the opposite way: the closer a woman gets to the top operational seat, the more the visibility gap can widen, because that is precisely the level at which speaking invitations start flowing, and habit decides who they flow to.
What Would Actually Move This
There's no tidy fix here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Some of it is on event organisers, who could treat "who is your CFO" as a real question when building a finance or governance panel instead of defaulting to the CEO's office. Some of it is on companies, who could extend the media training and PR support currently reserved for CEOs to their CFOs and COOs, on the theory that a well-spoken finance chief is also a brand asset. And some of it is simply about time. The pipeline data is genuinely encouraging, and pipelines take years to show up as visible seniority. The women who moved into COO and CFO seats in the last two or three years are, by definition, early in the tenure that usually precedes a "get this person to keynote our summit" invitation.
What's harder to solve with time alone is the underlying assumption about which roles are considered narrative-worthy. Until finance and operations are treated as functions with something to say publicly, and not just departments that keep the lights on quietly, the mic gap will likely persist even as the org chart gap keeps closing.
There's also a case to be made that COOs and CFOs are exactly the voices Indian business audiences are underserved by right now. Founder keynotes are abundant. Vision-and-growth panels are abundant. What's scarcer is someone with an unglossed, granular view of how a company survives a downturn, restructures around new technology, or actually manages the operational mechanics behind a headline growth number. Women moving into these roles in record numbers means that specific, currently underrepresented kind of expertise is sitting there, largely unbooked. The pipeline numbers say the talent is there. Whether the industry builds the habit of listening to it, and looking past the CEO's office when it puts together a panel, is a separate, slower project.
Draupadi on the Dais connects accomplished Indian women experts with the panels, media, and platforms built to find them. Claim the Dais. Follow us at @draupadionthedais.