Not only in managing the homes, the women in India are also very successfully managing the corporate sector too. They are the professionals in their own right, they have done as well as their male counterparts, and they have risen from the ranks.
The Companies Act 2013 and SEBI guidelines have now made it mandatory for all listed companies to have at least one woman on their boards — either as an executive or a non-executive director — before April 1, 2015.
Most of these women were already on the boards of well-known companies long before the law mandated quotas for women.
Among India’s busiest women directors are former Indian Institute of Management professor Indira Parikh; HDFC Managing Director Renu Sud Karnad; and former ICICI Securities MD and CEO Ramni Narula. Each of them currently sits on boards of seven listed companies.
Former Director and General Manager of General Insurance Corporation Bhagyam Ramani; former SBI Deputy Managing Director Bharati Rao; former Senior Managing Director of Blackstone Group Punita Kumar Sinha; and former FICCI Executive Vaijayanti Pandit hold board positions in six listed companies each.
Similarly, former Chairman and Managing Director of Indian Bank Ranjana Kumar, who was also the first woman to head a public sector bank; former Deputy Governor of RBI Kishori Udeshi; former McKinsey partner Ireena Vittal; and former PepsiCo India Executive Director Vibha Paul Rishi are among those who have accepted board positions in five public listed companies each.
Their board positions are not limited to just listed companies, they sit on boards of a few unlisted companies too.
An exception among these women is Rajashree Birla, mother of Kumar Mangalam Birla; she sits on the boards of seven AV Birla group companies, of which only two appointments (to the boards of Century Textiles and Century Enka) were made after the law on women directors took effect.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson and Managing Director of Biocon, another sought-after director, sits on the boards of Infosys, United Breweries and Narayana Hrudayalaya Ltd, besides Biocon and its associates.