Women in Management – An Enquiry with respect to the Board Composition of NIFTY Companies

Women participation in management is in its introduction stage in India. The Companies Act, 2013 mandatorily requires at least one woman on the Board in the specified class of companies. Similarly, SEBI’s listing agreement also requires the listed companies to have a woman director on the Board. India has taken legislative action and imposed quotas and also used other measures like moral persuasion and introduced voluntary measures through corporate governance codes or gender diversity policies or guidelines etc. As the presence of female top managers in the industrial sector shows the existence of high paying jobs for women and also encourages other women to seek better employment, this study looks at the proportion of female participants in boards of major 50 NIFTY Companies. The average proportion of top female board members is quite low at about one or two. This appears to be driven in part by gender disparity in education level and the lack of female managers in relatively large firms.