Only 119 of India’s 2,285 NSE-listed companies are led by women CEOs or Managing Directors. That is just 5% of corporate India’s listed universe.
Those numbers have gained fresh relevance after former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said she does not believe she would have become a CEO had she stayed in India. The remark sparked a familiar debate. Was it an unfair criticism of India, or did it reflect the realities of climbing the corporate ladder as a woman?
While Nooyi’s statement is ultimately a personal opinion, India’s corporate leadership data offers important context to the discussion.
Leadership Funnel Shrinks
The scarcity of women CEOs is not because women are absent from the workforce. Instead, representation declines steadily with every step up the corporate hierarchy.
Primeinfobase data shows women make up 23% of employees in NSE-listed companies. Their share falls to 14% among Key Managerial Personnel, 10% among Executive Directors, and finally 5% at the CEO or Managing Director level.
The pattern suggests that the challenge lies less in attracting women into corporate careers and more in ensuring they continue progressing into operational leadership roles that typically serve as stepping stones to the CEO’s office.
Management consulting firms, including McKinsey & Company, have repeatedly identified barriers such as unequal access to profit-and-loss responsibilities, career interruptions, sponsorship gaps and unconscious bias as factors that slow women’s advancement into senior executive positions. Their research suggests that leadership pipelines narrow long before boardroom appointments are made.
Progress Has Been Uneven
India’s corporate landscape has nevertheless changed considerably over the past decade.
In 2015, SEBI required every listed company to appoint at least one woman director to its board, accelerating gender diversity in corporate governance. Today, women occupy far more board seats than they did a decade ago.
India has also produced globally recognised business leaders such as Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Nisaba Godrej and Leena Nair, demonstrating that women have broken through the highest levels of business leadership.
Yet board diversity has not translated into executive parity. Independent directors contribute to governance, but CEOs typically emerge from years of managing businesses, operations and revenue-generating divisions. It is this executive pipeline where women’s representation remains disproportionately low.
India And The World
The gender gap in corporate leadership is not unique to India.
According to the 2025 Fortune 500 list, women lead 55 of America’s 500 largest companies, or 11% of the total. That is more than double India’s share among listed companies, but it also underscores that even mature economies continue to struggle with gender representation in the CEO’s office.
The comparison is useful because it shifts the conversation away from whether India is uniquely disadvantaged. Instead, it highlights that while progress is visible globally, women continue to be underrepresented in top executive roles almost everywhere.
Beyond One Executive’s Story
No dataset can determine whether Indra Nooyi herself would have become a CEO had she built her career in India instead of the United States. Individual careers depend on talent, timing, opportunity and circumstance.
What the evidence does show is that women remain significantly underrepresented at the highest levels of India’s corporate sector despite making up nearly a quarter of the workforce in listed companies.
Rather than reducing Nooyi’s remarks to a question of national pride, they offer an opportunity to examine whether India’s leadership pipeline is broad enough to translate female talent into executive leadership. The country’s boardrooms have become more diverse, but the CEO’s office remains one of corporate India’s most persistent glass ceilings.
The debate, therefore, is not whether Nooyi was right or wrong. It is whether India’s next generation of women leaders will face the same odds.
