Progress with Still Lagging Gaps
The Indian workforce has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Women today are software architects, product managers, data scientists, plant engineers, HR leaders, startup founders and CXO-level decision-makers. Whether in IT services, Global Capability Centres (GCCs), manufacturing, fintech, or consulting, women are playing an essential role in business growth and innovation.
But there is much more behind the bright lights; in fact, women are facing long-standing and ongoing issues that shape their professional pathways. The challenges are not just confined to individual workplaces. They are structural, cultural and systemic. Most of them are subtle, unspoken, and normalised over time, making both identification and confrontation more difficult. For organisations, these realities can no longer be addressed through moral or social conversations alone. It is a business imperative.
Firms that do not create inclusive systems face talent loss, decreased engagement, stagnated innovation, and diminished leadership prospects. Those who respond with data-informed, thoughtful strategies build stronger and stronger teams. In the blog, I discuss the most prevalent challenges facing working women in India and propose solutions through intentional design, technology-powered hiring and inclusive workforce practices with companies.
The Gender Pay Gap: The Silent Inequality
The Challenge
Despite achieving similar education, skills and performance, women in India continue to earn less than men in all industries. At entry levels, the gap is not apparent, but it grows sharply as careers advance. Women are in many ways underrepresented and underpaid at senior levels, where compensation includes bonuses, stock options and leadership-linked incentives. Socialisation also comes into play. For the sake of being seen as aggressive or hard hitting, women aren’t able to negotiate their compensation. For some, they take discounted deals that signal they can be trusted or that they can get some flexibility. In the long run, these gaps will accumulate, straining economic independence, confidence, and long-term wealth building.
How Companies Can Solve It
Companies need to replace subjective compensation decisions with structured, data-driven frameworks.
- Perform regular pay equity audits by role, experience level, and location.
- Set open salary bands and communicate them directly.
- Make a compensation decision based on skills, results, and impact and not on negotiation prowess.
- Teach managers to identify and address unconscious bias when granting evaluations.
- Review promotion-linked compensation separately to make sure it’s fair.
Pay equity builds trust. Women who see pay transparency and fairness in their own compensation experience dramatic improvements in engagement and retention.
Penalties for Career Breaks When Experience Is Undervalued
The Challenge
Career breaks remain a significant barrier for women in India. Many women in India will take career breaks for maternity leave, caregiving duties, elder care, health reasons, or personal priorities. Yet when they come back, return attempts during their breaks are mostly treated as gaps in their skills, not stages of life, as missed skills rather than stages in their lives.
Recruiters and hiring managers can question a candidate’s commitment, adaptability, or technical relevance even when a candidate has good prior experience. So women are hired to do jobs that are way below their abilities, grow more slowly than they would, or withdraw entirely from the job market.
How Companies Can Solve It
This means that organisations can radically rethink how they measure experience.
- Transition from linear career expectations to skills-first judgment.
- Establish structured return-to-work or re-entry programs.
- Provide project-based, contract roles or flexibility options for transitional pathways.
- Invest in reskilling and upskilling to meet business needs.
- Teach recruitment teams to view career breaks objectively.
Experience does not expire. When companies realise this, they tap into pools of highly competent, motivated and loyal talent.
Workplace Bias and Everyday Stereotyping
The Challenge
Workplace bias can take the form of quiet, unconscious prejudice, yet it can result in dramatic consequences. Women could be seen as less ambitious, less technical, or less fit for leadership roles. Their perspectives in meetings can be interrupted, dismissed, or attributed to others. For women, feedback frequently centres around personality rather than performance.
These micro-inequities in turn influence confidence, visibility and career progression over time.
How Companies Can Solve It
To reduce bias, there needs to be both awareness and structure.
- Use structured interview and evaluation frameworks.
- Ensure diverse representation on hiring and promotion panels.
- Provide people managers with bias-awareness training.
- Standardise performance reviews with defined metrics.
- Promote inclusive meeting norms that value all perspectives.
Bias-free systems lead to better decisions, stronger collaboration, and higher team trust.
Leadership Representation and the Leaky Pipeline
The Challenge
Despite substantial numbers of women entering the workforce, their representation in mid- and senior-level leadership positions declines dramatically. High-profile projects, strategic roles, or international positions that catalyse leadership development are consistently closed to women.
And then leadership potential tends to be evaluated through old-fashioned perspectives that prize availability over real impact, to the detriment of the more flexible.
How Companies Can Solve It
Leadership diversity needs to be intentional.
- Find the most effective women early and support their growth.
- Make stretch roles and leadership programs equitable.
- Monitor gender representation at levels and functions.
- Realign leadership readiness with outcomes, not hours.
- Hold senior leaders accountable for building diverse pipelines.
Diverse leaders ensure better governance, sound risk management, and better long-term performance.
Pressures of Work-Life Integration
The Challenge
In India, women bear a disproportionate burden of household and caregiving tasks. Rigid work hours, long commutes and an always-on culture make it tough to sustain long-term careers.
Many women quit positions not for lack of ambition or skill but because the systems are not flexible.
How Companies Can Solve It
Flexibility should be designed, not negotiated.
- Provide flexible, hybrid and remote working models.
- Measure performance by outcomes rather than presence
- Normalise flexibility across genders to prevent stigma.
- Create life stage-friendly policies
- Leverage technology to facilitate distributed collaboration.
Flexible work improves retention, productivity, and employer brand equity.
Safety, Harassment and Psychological Security
The Challenge
Workplace safety and harassment are still significant issues. Many incidents go unreported due to fear of retaliation, reputational damage, or career impact. Even small actions can lead to hostile, exclusionary environments, in the absence of psychological safety, engagement, creativity, and performance decline.
How Companies Can Solve It
Safety must be non-negotiable.
- Institute strong POSH frameworks with independent committees.
- Conduct regular training and awareness programs.
- Create confidential and accessible reporting mechanisms.
- Take swift and transparent action when violations occur.
- Create leadership ownership of safety issues.
A safe working environment is the foundation for sustainable performance.
Limited Access to Mentorship and Sponsorship
The Challenge
Many women lack mentors who can advise them on career decisions and sponsors who advocate for them in leadership conversations. Informal channels are often biased in favour of men, curtailing exposure and opportunities.
How Companies Can Solve It
- Create structured mentorship programs with clear goals.
- Encourage cross-functional and cross-level mentoring.
- Track sponsorship outcomes using career progression data.
- Acknowledge leaders who champion diverse talent and actively encourage it.
Mentorship builds confidence. Sponsorship builds visibility and advancement.
Rigid Recruitment Structures That Exclude Capability
The Challenge
Conventional hiring models emphasise ‘full-time availability,’ fixed hours, and minimal background qualifications. This excludes many skilled women who wish to have flexibility, take on project-based roles, or work in hybrid models.
How Companies Can Solve It
- Implement flexible hiring models.
- Leverage AI-enabled skills-first talent discovery.
- Roles that are contract, project, and outcome-oriented.
- Collaborate with diversity-first hiring platforms.
Inclusive recruitment broadens the pool of quality talent and accelerates the process and improves fit.
The Business Effect of Addressing These Challenges
There are tangible benefits within organisations that proactively address women’s workplace challenges:
- Faster hiring cycles and shorter time to fill.
- Increased retention and engagement.
- Stronger leadership pipelines.
- Enhanced innovation and decision-making.
- Strengthened employer credibility.
When ingrained in systems, inclusion morphs into a performance multiplier, not a compliance exercise for compliance’s sake.
How SheWork Promotes Inclusive Hiring for Performance
SheWork is a diversity-first, AI-powered workforce platform for global businesses, GCCs, and startups to share best-in-industry engineering, tech, and non-tech talent across India.
Leveraging AI accuracy with human brains, SheWork creates data-led, bias-free hiring spaces that result in real business impact.
Having access to more than 300,000 professionals across 40+ domains, ISO-certified processes, and flexible workforce models, SheWork provides support to organisations in areas such as engineering staffing, tech hiring, GCC expansion, RPO, and MSP solutions.
Rethinking the Future of Work
Working women’s struggles are not unique ones. There are signs that workplace systems need redesign. When organisations stop obsessing about intent and instead concentrate on structure, data, and accountability, inclusion is not just sustainable. The future of work is in organisations that identify talent in all its strengths and that design cultures where women can grow, lead and succeed.
Build future-ready teams with global strategic talent.