Finance is one of India’s fastest-growing sectors; financial, real estate and professional services grew 9.9% in FY26, outpacing every other broad category in the economy. But value growth added has not translated into proportional growth in who gets to sit at the table.

This piece asks a narrower, more falsifiable question than “is there a gender gap in Indian finance”: where exactly does it open up, what has actually narrowed it, and what would a genuinely adapted, not imported, fix look like?

1. Challenge

The gap in Indian finance is not a hiring problem. It is a retention-and-promotion problem. Women make up 31% of entry-level hires in Indian financial services, but only 13% of the C-suite, a loss of roughly two-thirds of representation between the first hire and the top, according to McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s 2025 India-specific Women in the Workplace report. A 2024 CareEdge-ESG analysis of 59 BFSI companies employing 1.89 million people found median female representation across the sector sits at just 22%, ranging from 10–30% depending on the firm.

Women’s representation across the career ladder in Indian financial services

The sharper evidence sits inside the pay data, not just the headcount data. CFA Society India’s analysis of Indian public companies found that within financial services firms, women make up 21.7% of employees but only 15.9% of Key Managerial Personnel (KMP) and while overall median pay between men and women is close to parity (a 0.97 ratio), that ratio collapses to 0.52 at the KMP level and 0.64 for directors. In plain terms: the closer you get to real decision-making power, the wider both the numeric and the pay gap become even among comparably qualified people occupying comparable rungs.

2. Solution what actually works

Two categories of intervention show measurable results, which cannot be interchanged.

Structured return-to-work programmes appear to be the single most evidence-backed lever. Axis Bank’s RTW programme has documented at least one participant progressing to Director within nine years of re-entry, per Udaiti Foundation’s study of return-to-work programmes in India a structured pathway, not an accident. Cross-sector, Wipro’s “Begin Again” returnship reports retention rates around 70% for returnee hires, notably higher than standard channels, suggesting the mechanism refresher training before reassignment, paid transition periods, mentorship, and a defined progression track has a real, replicable effect independent of industry.

Disclosure-based accountability, rather than pure headcount quotas, is the second lever with emerging evidence behind it. SEBI’s own leadership has publicly pushed past the “one woman on the board” checkbox: in December 2023, then-SEBI chair Madhabi Puri Buch proposed measuring the percentage of payroll cost going to women and tracking POSH (workplace harassment) complaint data as truer gauges of inclusion than board composition alone an implicit admission that the existing quota had been gamed.

3. Where geography, time, institution

This analysis is bounded to India, financial year 2023–26, across three institutional layers: public sector banks (a workforce of over 900,000, with women at roughly 24% as of the most recent parliamentary panel review, up from 17% when the Khandelwal Committee first measured it in 2009); private banks and BFSI firms in the CareEdge-ESG sample of 59 companies; and the mutual fund industry, comprising 40+ AMCs, only 21 of which employ a female fund manager at all, per Morningstar Investment Research.

4. For whom target population

Three overlapping groups are most affected: women in mid-career roles who hit the KMP ceiling despite tenure and qualification parity; women returning after a career break NITI Aayog’s State of India’s Women report, cited by Dheya Career Mentors, estimates roughly 2 crore (20 million) Indian women fall into this category, actively considering re-entry; and women in specialised, high-visibility roles such as fund management, where representation is thinnest and scrutiny is highest.

5. Under what conditions regulation and context

The regulatory scaffolding exists but was built with a compliance ceiling, not a floor for real change. The Companies Act, 2013 (Section 149(1)) and SEBI’s LODR Regulations, 2015 mandate at least one independent woman director for large listed companies. The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, later folded into the Code on Wages, 2019, mandates equal pay for equal work but enforcement mechanisms remain weak, and pay audits are rare outside voluntary ESG disclosure exercises like CFA Society India’s. A 2009 Khandelwal Committee recommendation that at least 15% of public sector bank branches be run as all-women branches has been only partially implemented, decades on.

6. Evidence: The strongest data point

The single most useful piece of evidence for this piece isn’t a representation statistic it’s a performance one. Morningstar’s analysis of India’s mutual fund industry found that women fund managers handle just 12.63% of industry AUM (₹6.66 trillion) and represent only 8.88% of all fund managers: 42 individuals across 21 fund houses. Yet of the assets they manage or co-manage, 93.5% outperformed peer averages over five years, versus 70–71% over shorter one- and three-year windows.

Representation vs. performance: women fund managers in India (Morningstar, FY24)

This is the clean evidentiary core of the “credibility gap”: a subset of demonstrably above-average performers holds a fraction of the capital under management relative to their demonstrated skill.

7. Limitations: Are they still valid, or resolved?

Largely still valid. The board-quota mandate has produced a numeric floor but not depth: a 2023 proxy advisory analysis found 45% of Nifty 500 companies still sit at exactly one woman director the bare legal minimum and a significant share of appointees are promoter-affiliated rather than independently recruited, which former SEBI chairman M. Damodaran has publicly criticised as legally and substantively hollow.

The pay-ratio evidence (0.52 at KMP level) shows the board mandate never touched compensation or real seniority. SEBI’s proposed payroll-cost and POSH-complaint metrics remain, as of the most recent available reporting, a stated intention rather than a binding disclosure rule so this limitation has been named by the regulator but not yet closed.

Returnship programmes, meanwhile, are real and effective where they exist, but remain voluntary, concentrated in a handful of large private banks and IT-adjacent finance employers, with no regulatory requirement or scale mandate meaning their benefit is currently available to a fraction of the roughly 2 crore women who could use it.

8. If India has to adapt not adopt what needs to change

Importing the Western quota model wholesale (e.g., Norway’s binding 40% board mandate) would likely reproduce the same tokenism India already has, just at a higher numeric floor the Nifty 500 evidence shows quotas without a “critical mass” requirement (2+ women, not 1) simply shift the compliance target rather than the underlying culture. A better-fitted adaptation has three parts:

1. Convert SEBI’s proposed metrics from suggestion to requirement. Mandate disclosure of payroll cost share going to women and KMP-level pay ratios not just board headcount in annual BRSR filings, borrowing the disclosure-and-track logic (rather than fixed quotas) of the UK’s decade-old Women in Finance Charter, which moved 400+ signatories to an average 37% female representation through published, monitored targets rather than legal mandates.
2. Give returnship programmes regulatory teeth, not just corporate goodwill. RBI could tie priority-sector-style incentives, or a reporting requirement under existing HR disclosure norms, to structured RTW pathways at public sector banks specifically where representation (24%) still lags the private BFSI median (22%) despite a larger, older workforce and the original Khandelwal Committee mandate from 2009.
3. Require a minimum “critical mass” of two women directors, not one, for the largest listed financial firms, closing the single-token loophole that 45% of Nifty 500 firms currently use to satisfy the letter of the law.

None of this requires importing a foreign framework unmodified. It requires enforcing the logic India’s own regulators have already articulated, at a scale and with a bindingness they haven’t yet committed to.