Women's Representation in Senior Corporate Roles Falls as Avtar Flags US DEI Pullback

The Boardroom Law That Outlasted a Decade - and the C-Suite That Didn't In 2013, Parliament wrote something into the Companies Act that no listed company could opt out of: Section 149(1) required every board to seat at least one woman director.

It was a small, technical clause inside a much larger corporate governance overhaul. Over the decade since, board-level representation has held - through recessions, through changes of government in Delhi and in Washington, through entire industry cycles.

It held because a law does not need a sponsor to keep believing in it. Nothing so law-anchored ever existed for the next stage of a woman's career - the climb from board-seat visibility to the corner office. India's senior executive diversity, unlike its boardroom diversity, was never legislated.

It arrived instead through the HR playbooks of American and European multinationals expanding into Indian IT and BPO operations from the late 1990s onward, carrying diversity, equity and inclusion practices as part of the package - not as a response to Indian law or Indian demand.

That distinction is why this week's Avtar-Seramount findings land the way they do. Women's share of Corporate Executive roles at India's Best Companies for Women fell to 16.7% in 2026, down from 20% just a year earlier - steep enough to erase years of incremental gain in a single cycle.

Avtar's Saundarya Rajesh traces the setback directly to Washington: a US executive order in January 2025 rolling back federal DEI mandates, absorbed almost immediately inside Indian subsidiaries of American firms, then diffused outward, since large multinational practice has historically set the tone for the wider Indian corporate market.

The 2013 comparison is useful precisely because it breaks down in one place. The boardroom quota survived not because Indian companies believed in gender parity more than they believe in DEI today, but because compliance there was compulsory, monitored and penalised.

Executive-level inclusion had none of that architecture - it was a borrowed norm, sustained entirely by voluntary enthusiasm and voluntary enthusiasm evaporates the moment its original sponsor changes its mind. That the business case remains intact - 79.2% of these companies still report profit gains from inclusive practices, up from 70% last year - only sharpens the point: this was not a failure of the economics of inclusion.

It was a failure to convert a good idea into an institution. Why this matters beyond one HR survey is that it reveals which reforms in India are genuinely India's own and which are simply hosted here. A country that wants senior-level gender parity to survive its allies' politics will eventually need to do for the C-suite what it already did for the boardroom in 2013 - write it into law, not into a multinational's mission statement.