Women in Leadership Development: Why Generic Programs Aren’t Moving the Needle in India

There is a number that Indian organisations cite frequently in DEI conversations, and almost never examine with sufficient honesty: the percentage of women at entry level versus the percentage who make it to senior leadership.

In India, women make up 31 percent at the entry level but this decreases to just 13 percent in the C-suite. A KPMG and AIMA report from 2024 found that women hold only about 25 percent of C-suite positions in India, compared to 46 percent at entry-level roles, a gap the report describes as a leaky pipeline. According to a study by Avtar, a workplace culture consulting firm, women continue to hold just 19 percent of C-suite roles in India.

These numbers have not moved meaningfully in a decade, despite the fact that Indian organisations have been running women in leadership programmes throughout that period. Cohorts have been nominated. Modules have been delivered. Certificates have been issued. The pipeline has continued to leak at the same points.

The problem is not that organisations are doing nothing. The problem is that what they are doing is not designed to address the actual causes of the gap. Generic women in leadership programmes, built around confidence, communication, and personal branding, are treating the symptom at the individual level while the causes operate at the structural and cultural level. The result is a decade of investment that has produced meaningful development experiences for individuals but minimal movement at the organisational level.

This article examines why that happens and what a design that actually moves the needle requires.

What Generic Programmes Typically Get Right and Where They Fall Short

The standard women in leadership programme in an Indian organisation typically covers a recognisable set of themes: building executive presence, developing negotiation skills, managing visibility, building internal networks, and navigating stakeholder relationships. These are legitimate development areas. Women in middle and senior management in India do benefit from developing them.

The design failure is not in the content. It is in the implicit theory of change that underlies these programmes: the assumption that if individual women develop stronger personal capabilities, they will advance in greater numbers. This theory treats underrepresentation as primarily a capability gap in the women themselves.

It is not. The research on why women do not advance in Indian organisations at rates comparable to their male peers consistently points to factors that individual capability development cannot address: the broken rung at the first management transition, informal sponsorship networks that favour men, performance evaluation criteria that encode masculine leadership norms, flexibility penalties that disproportionately affect women with caregiving responsibilities, and the absence of senior women in decision-making roles who can advocate for the next cohort.

None of these are solved by a better negotiation workshop. Organisations that run those workshops and then declare they are investing in women’s leadership are addressing the development need while leaving the system conditions that undermine advancement entirely intact.

The Broken Rung: The Most Underaddressed Problem in Indian Organisations

The research on gender gaps in corporate India consistently identifies the first promotion from individual contributor to manager as the most critical attrition point for women. The Broken Rung phenomenon, highlighted in the DivHersity Benchmarking Report 2023-2024 by HerKey, illustrates a critical gap where women are often unable to ascend from entry-level positions to managerial roles at rates comparable to their male counterparts.

This first transition is where the pipeline breaks most severely. Women who do not reach the first management level are permanently excluded from consideration for every level above it. And because the broken rung is structural rather than individual, no amount of individual capability development for the women concerned changes the outcome.

The factors that produce the broken rung in India are well-documented. Line managers who make promotion recommendations operate within informal evaluation criteria that they have rarely examined: who seems like a natural leader, who takes ownership visibly, whose contributions are most visible in team discussions, who navigates the informal social architecture of the team most effectively. In Indian organisations with high power distance and strong informal networks that tend to be gender-homogenous at senior levels, these criteria systematically disadvantage women even when formal qualifications are equivalent.

Addressing this requires a different kind of intervention: structured evaluation criteria for promotion decisions, manager capability development that makes unconscious bias in talent identification visible and accountable, and explicit tracking of promotion rates by gender at the first management transition. These are system-level changes. They cannot be delivered in a women’s leadership programme attended only by the women themselves.

The Sponsorship Gap: Mentoring Is Not Enough

Most women in leadership programmes in Indian organisations include a mentoring component. A senior leader is paired with a high-potential woman. They meet monthly. The mentor offers advice, career perspective, and occasional encouragement.

Mentoring is valuable. It is not, however, the mechanism through which most careers at senior levels advance in Indian organisations. That mechanism is sponsorship: a senior leader who actively advocates for a person in rooms they are not in, puts their name forward for visible assignments, and uses their political capital to create opportunities for the person they are sponsoring.

The research distinguishes clearly between mentors and sponsors. Mentors give advice. Sponsors give access. And in Indian corporate environments, where informal social networks are particularly influential in how opportunities are distributed and where women are significantly underrepresented at the levels where sponsorship relationships typically form, the sponsorship gap is a primary driver of the progression disparity.

Generic women in leadership programmes almost never address this gap directly. They do not identify specific senior sponsors for programme participants, create accountability for those sponsors to advocate actively, or track whether sponsorship relationships translate into visible opportunities. They hold mentoring conversations. They do not change how advancement actually happens.

Organisations that have made measurable progress in senior women’s advancement have typically done so by making sponsorship an explicit and accountable part of the programme design, not an optional add-on to mentoring. This includes identifying sponsors at a level senior enough to have genuine influence over advancement decisions, briefing those sponsors on the distinction between advice-giving and advocacy, and creating check-in mechanisms that ask: what specific opportunities has this sponsor created for their sponsee in the past quarter?

How Evaluation and Visibility Systems Disadvantage Women in Indian Contexts

Performance evaluation in most Indian organisations is nominally objective. In practice, it is shaped by a set of informal criteria that are rarely examined and that carry a consistent gender pattern.

Visibility in the right contexts, the ability to claim ownership of outcomes confidently, presence in informal social settings where organisational currency is exchanged, and confidence in self-advocacy are all factors that influence how performance is read by the evaluators who make promotion and advancement decisions. These factors are not neutral. They are shaped by social norms that are different for men and women in Indian professional contexts, and by the fact that most Indian senior leadership cohorts remain predominantly male, which means the leadership template against which others are evaluated is implicitly masculine.

This is not a matter of individual bias in the people conducting evaluations. It is a structural feature of how evaluation systems are designed and applied. Structured competency frameworks that define leadership in behavioural terms, applied consistently and reviewed for gender pattern in outcomes, begin to address this. The competency mapping framework that Able Ventures uses for leadership roles explicitly examines whether competency definitions are capturing the behaviours that actually predict leadership performance or whether they are encoding historical patterns that carry demographic bias.

The Flexibility Penalty in Indian Workplaces

India has one of the most significant gender gaps in domestic and caregiving responsibility distribution of any major economy. The practical consequence for women in corporate careers is that the stage of career life when caregiving responsibilities are highest coincides with the stage when most Indian organisations make their critical talent identification decisions: the late twenties and early thirties, which is precisely when the first and second management transitions typically occur.

Organisations that do not have genuinely flexible working norms, and most Indian organisations do not, regardless of what their policies say, impose a flexibility penalty on the career trajectories of women who take advantage of formal flexibility options. Research consistently shows that in organisations where long hours and physical presence are the primary visibility signals, employees who work flexibly are rated lower on commitment and potential even when their performance output is equivalent.

This is a system condition that no women’s leadership programme can address from within the programme itself. It requires senior leadership to be explicit about how the organisation evaluates commitment and potential, and to change the signals that currently communicate that physical presence and visible hours are the primary currency of career advancement.

What Effective Women in Leadership Development Actually Looks Like

The organisations that have made measurable progress in advancing women to senior leadership in India share a set of design principles that distinguish their approach from the generic programme model.

Development is anchored in data, not assumption. Rather than defaulting to a standard curriculum of confidence and communication, effective programmes begin with a structured assessment of each participant’s actual development profile. Behavioural assessment data tells a development programme what each participant actually needs to work on, rather than what the programme has decided all women need. For senior women, this frequently reveals that the development need is not confidence or communication at all, but specific strategic influence capabilities, stakeholder navigation skills, or board-level communication. Programmes that deliver a generic confidence curriculum to a room full of senior women who are already highly capable and who know it produce polite engagement and limited development.

The programme includes the system, not just the women. Effective programmes involve the managers and sponsors of participants, not just the participants themselves. This creates accountability within the system for the development of the women in it, and it surfaces the specific system-level barriers that each participant is navigating, which is information that neither the programme designers nor senior leadership typically have access to without asking.

Sponsorship is structured and accountable. Participants are assigned sponsors, not mentors, at a level senior enough to have real influence over advancement decisions. Sponsors are briefed on their role as advocates rather than advisors. The programme tracks whether sponsorship relationships are producing visible opportunities, and this tracking is part of the programme’s own accountability architecture.

Promotion and talent identification processes are examined in parallel. No leadership programme for women is complete if the criteria and processes through which advancement decisions are made remain unexamined. Leadership gap diagnosis that surfaces where and how women are being lost from the pipeline gives HR and senior leadership the specific information needed to redesign the moments in the talent process where women are most consistently disadvantaged.

The programme feeds the succession pipeline explicitly. High-potential women who complete development programmes should be visible in succession planning conversations. Succession planning systems that are gender-audited, checking whether women are being nominated and developed for critical roles at equivalent rates to men with comparable performance profiles, are a direct mechanism for converting development investment into representation outcomes.

The Role of Executive Coaching in Women’s Senior Leadership Development

For women at mid-to-senior levels navigating specific career transitions or structural challenges, executive coaching that is anchored in behavioural assessment data offers a fundamentally different development experience from group programmes. It surfaces the specific gaps between a leader’s self-perception and how they are experienced by their stakeholders, which is often the most actionable development data available.

For senior women in Indian organisations, coaching conversations frequently reveal a specific pattern: the leader has significantly more capability and organisational impact than their current role and visibility reflect. The gap is not in their performance. It is in how they are narrating their performance, how they are building relationships with the senior stakeholders who influence advancement decisions, and how they are positioning themselves for the transitions their career trajectory requires. These are highly specific, contextual development needs that a generic programme cannot address with the precision that individual coaching provides.

The combination of structured assessment data, targeted group learning, and individual coaching is the architecture that produces the most reliable outcomes for senior women. Each component does something the others cannot. Assessment surfaces the honest baseline. Group learning builds shared capability and network. Coaching personalises the application to each person’s specific context and ambition.

What CHROs and L&D Leaders Need to Ask Before Commissioning a Programme

Most women in leadership programmes are commissioned in good faith by HR and L&D leaders who genuinely want to move the needle. The failure is frequently in the questions that are not asked before the programme design is finalised.

The McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2025 research on India, Nigeria, and Kenya identifies that obstacles for women’s workforce representation in India emerge early, at the entry level, with low recruitment, high attrition, and limited promotions, which confirms that the system-level work needs to begin at the first management transition, not only at senior levels. Programmes that focus exclusively on senior women without addressing the broken rung are working on one end of the pipeline while it drains from the other.