Women Representation in Boardrooms: Do They just Arrive? an Indian Experience

Abstract

This paper seeks to study the current status of women representation on corporate boards as well as focuses on understanding the innumerable initiatives taken by countries across the globe towards empowering women. It aims at mulling over the various coherent issues and challenges hindering the female participation in boardrooms and suggests the course of action to accelerate the pace of advancement and to speed the transition of women in boardrooms. For this purpose both qualitative and quantitative methods has been employed. Firstly, we prepare a fable that provides a bird's eye view of the current status of the female directors' participation of both selected advanced and emerging economies across the globe including India by revisiting the each country profile, reports, surveys conducted by recognized and reputed agencies worldwide and reviewing the prior research work. Secondly, a cross- sectional analysis has been done by statistically analyzing the data of 100 samples of companies listed on BSE (Bombay Stock Exchange). It is found that majority of Indian companies' boardrooms comprise only one female director and this phenomenon remains constant during the study period. Moreover, number of companies with at least one women director on boards has been increased drastically and characterized with relatively larger sized boards and better performance in most of the years. Hence, promoting women workforce participation at each level of the work can yield big development payoffs. It can bring a rich talent pool with different ideologies and experiences for driving firm innovation and productivity.