BENGALURU: Ten years ago, MNC IT companies boasted six women at the helm. Prominent leaders included Accenture India’s Chairman Rekha Menon, IBM’s Vanitha Narayanan, HP’s Neelam Dhawan, Capgemini’s Aruna Jayanthi, and Intel’s Kumud Srinivasan. Back then, Meta (Facebook) was headed by Kirthiga Reddy. Several of these leaders managed firms with nearly 100,000 employees.
Fast forward to today. MNCs remain steadfast in their commitment to increasing women leaders at the top. In contrast, despite higher representation of women at entry-level positions, women leaders are still underrepresented in IT firms with fewer visible examples at the top. Barring a handful of women in senior leadership roles, Indian IT firms look pale with poor representation of women in the C-suite. Wipro appointed Aparna Iyer as its CFO, while Suzanne Dann is the CEO of Americas 2. Infosys roped in Inderpreet Sawhney as its chief legal officer and chief compliance officer. The data shows that fewer
women executives
hold top management positions and report to the board in IT firms.
MNCs, including global capability centres (GCCs), are taking the lead in promoting more women to senior leadership positions. India has 1,760 GCCs with an increased focus on high-value services and ER&D. A Nasscom-Zinnov report showed that over the past five years, global roles in India expanded significantly, with more than 6,500 such positions now established. Interestingly, this included 1,100 women leaders holding global roles. Zinnov’s data on GCCs showed that at the executive tier, women constitute 6.7% of the total workforce. The mid-level positions, with 5 to 8 years of professional experience, are filled by 24.3% of women employees. Senior roles, which demand 9 to 12 years of experience, comprise 15.7% of the female workforce. GCC employs 1.9 million people out of India’s total tech talent pool of 5.8 million people.
MNCs have led the pack with several policy interventions to nurture promising women executives into senior leadership roles. These firms actively monitor their career advancement through mentorship programmes and encourage them to pursue international opportunities. Also, as MNCs do the majority of the core work for their parent entities, job roles are strategically aligned to newer opportunities in emerging technologies reshaping their business landscapes.
Lalitha Indrakanti, CEO of JLR Technology & Business Services India (TBSI), said the key difference between working in an IT services company and a GCC lies in the depth of orga
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