Women hold 12% of managerial positions in India, says ILO
The share of women in managerial positions in India is around 12%, according to the International Labour Organization's report Women in Business and Management: Scaling Success, released in November 2026 and covered in detail by ThePrint. That is roughly one manager in eight, based on 2024 data for India, against 20% in Asia and the Pacific and 30.5% worldwide in 2025. For anyone booking speakers, quoting experts or building a leadership pipeline, it means the pool of women with senior titles is small, and it gets smaller at every level above.
In short
- Women hold around 12% of managerial positions in India, based on 2024 data in the ILO's November 2026 report Women in Business and Management: Scaling Success.
- The ILO puts women's share of managerial jobs at 20% in Asia and the Pacific and 30.5% worldwide in 2025, up from 24.5% globally in 2000.
- India's top 500 listed companies by turnover had 9 women CEOs, 25 women managing directors and 22 women CFOs, according to Ministry of Corporate Affairs data given to the Lok Sabha in August 2026.
- Women's labour force participation rate in India rose to 34.7% in July to September 2026, from 33.2% in the previous quarter, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey for people aged 15 and above.
Women in managerial positions in India by the numbers
The ILO figure for India is around 12%. It comes from 2024 data in the report's country annex. The report draws on several sources, including a 2025 enterprise survey that covered nearly 12,000 businesses across 99 countries.
The managerial category is wide. It takes in the person who runs a team of six, the head of a department and the chief executive of a listed company. So the 12% figure describes the whole management layer in India, the people who hire, run appraisals and sign off budgets.
If your speaker brief asks for "Head of" or "VP and above", this is the pool you are drawing from. It is around 12% women at the base, and the share drops as the titles go up.
How does India compare with Asia and the world on women managers?
The ILO's modelled estimates put women's share of managerial positions at 30.5% worldwide in 2025, up from 24.5% in 2000. In Asia and the Pacific the share rose from 16.2% to 20% over the same 25 years. India, at around 12%, sits well below both.
The gap is wider at the top. In August 2026, Minister of State for Corporate Affairs Harsh Malhotra told the Lok Sabha in a written reply that India's top 500 listed companies by turnover had 9 women CEOs, 25 women managing directors and 22 women CFOs, according to the IANS report on the ministry's data. The same reply counted 860 women directors and board members across those 500 companies. Across all active companies in India, about 1.16 million women are directors, out of a total of 3.9 million directors.
The ministry also told Parliament it had not conducted any specific assessment of the barriers women directors face, and that no new diversity targets were under consideration. Between 2021-22 and 2025-26 it passed 50 adjudication orders, with penalties totalling Rs 71.01 lakh, for breaches of the rules on women directors.
We looked at how companies fill their top jobs in our essay on women in the C-suite and external hires. The ILO number adds the layer underneath, and that layer is where the top jobs are filled from.
Why the manager layer decides who reaches the top
Every CEO, CFO and board member in the ministry's count was a manager first. A company with few women managers in 2024 will have few women in line for its top jobs ten years from now. Our piece on women in leadership roles in India looked at the first promotion from individual contributor to manager, the step where many women fall behind.
Women's labour force participation rate rose to 34.7% in July to September 2026, from 33.2% in April to June, and the female worker population ratio rose from 31.3% to 32.8%, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey for people aged 15 and above, as The Policy Edge reported from the MoSPI quarterly bulletin.
Much of the growth in women's work sits outside any management ladder. ICRIER's 2026 study, which we covered in our piece on the quality of women's employment in India, found that most of the new work women took up was self-employment and unpaid family labour. Those jobs rarely come with a manager's title.
Inside companies, the signals are mixed. The 2026 Women Leadership Survey by the All India Management Association and KPMG in India found that "while senior level representation has increased, perceptions of fairness and consistency in advancement have weakened", according to KPMG India's summary of the 2026 survey. The same summary says a significant proportion of women report not taking part in any formal leadership development initiative.
What the 12% figure means for event organisers and journalists
Pick four people at random from a pool that is 12% women, and the chance that all four are men is about 60%. A panel built only from senior titles starts with those odds, before anyone's contacts or habits come into it. Our essay on why women get invited to speak less often looked at how this plays out on Indian stages.
Booking by expertise widens the pool. The person who runs a cloud migration or a quarterly forecast often knows the detail better than someone three levels up. Two live Dais speakers show what that looks like.
Shilpi Mitra is a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft in Bangalore, where she leads the Hybrid and Migration charter for Azure SQL at Azure Data. She has over two decades of experience, works in enterprise cloud and security, has spoken at GHCI 25, WTN25 and WTN26, and speaks on leadership, career transitions and diversity and inclusion.
Priyanka Agarwal is Deputy Director and FP&A Category Lead (South Africa) at PepsiCo, based in Hyderabad. She is a Chartered Accountant with over a decade in corporate finance and FP&A, and she was a panellist at the 44th edition of the India CFO Summit 2026, speaking on building resilient enterprises. A finance event that only invites CFOs would never reach her.
Journalists face the same filter. A story on cloud costs or company forecasting needs a source who does that work every week. The women leadership speakers collection on the Dais lists experts who speak on leadership and management, and The Search lets you filter every live speaker by subject, industry and city.
What HR and D&I teams can take from the ILO report
ThePrint's report on the ILO study includes a company example from India. At Havas India, women's share of the workforce rose from 19% in 2020 to 43% in 2025, and women held half of its leadership positions in 2025, while the company grew from fewer than 300 employees to more than 2,000. In 2020 it set up an internal committee of 12 leaders, including the CEO and 10 women. It runs a six-month Maternity Bounce Back programme, and 71% of employees who took maternity leave between 2022 and 2025 stayed at least a year after returning.
One company's numbers prove little about India as a whole. Havas India gave the work to a named committee and built a programme around the return from maternity leave, and its numbers moved over the same five years. For an HR team, that is a plan with an owner, a budget line and a figure to report each year.
Boards decide who gets the last step up, and nomination committees decide who reaches the board. Mona Cheriyan, former President and Group Head of Human Resources at Thomas Cook (India), chairs the Nomination and Remuneration Committee on the boards of Capgemini and Haldyn Glass. She speaks, joins panels and gives media commentary on leadership, workplace culture and diversity and inclusion.
The gap between the org chart and the stage is the subject of our essay on senior women executives who rarely get onstage. The ILO data shows the same gap one level down.
What women managers can do with the 12% number
If you are one of the women in that 12%, you are scarce in the data and easy to miss in a speaker search that starts from the top title. A profile that names your subject, your city and the formats you take puts you in front of people who book by expertise.
Be specific about the work. "Runs pricing and forecasting for a consumer goods business" tells an organiser or a reporter what to ask you about.
Say yes to the smaller rooms too. A podcast, a college talk or a quote in a trade story puts your name on record, and the next organiser searching for your subject will find it.
If you are building a panel and want women experts chosen by subject, request a speaker from the Dais with the topic and format you need.