‘Hiring women isn’t enough’: Women entrepreneurs on what India needs for true gender parity

As the world marks Women’s Equality Day, the conversation around women in technology is shifting from representation to meaningful equality. While more women are entering STEM and technology careers, significant gaps persist in retention, pay, promotions, leadership and decision-making. As the industry embraces AI and new technologies, ensuring women have an equal role in building, shaping and leading these systems has become equally important. WION spoke to women entrepreneurs and startup leaders about what it will take to move from hiring women to achieving genuine gender parity in India’s technology sector.

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For Shreya Krishnan, Managing Director, AnitaB.org India, gender parity in technology cannot be achieved by focusing only on the entry-level pipeline. She says the biggest challenge comes at the subsequent stages of a woman’s career, particularly retention. “True gender parity in tech requires looking beyond the pipeline.” Krishnan points to inadequate maternity support, unconscious bias and a lack of flexible work models that accommodate caregiving responsibilities as factors affecting women's retention. She also highlights persistent disparities in pay and leadership, arguing that companies need to go beyond hiring targets. “The solution goes beyond more hiring targets. It requires audited pay, transparent promotion criteria, active sponsorship into leadership, and return-to-work programs that treat career breaks as assets.”

Hiring targets are only the beginning

Krishnan argues that diversity hiring targets are important, but they do not necessarily indicate whether women are able to build long-term careers within an organisation. “Diversity hiring targets are a necessary start, but the real work begins after the offer letter is signed.” She says companies need to change how they measure gender parity, moving towards outcome-based indicators such as retention rates, pay equity, promotion rates and leadership sponsorship. “Targets measure intent, but they do not measure impact.” According to Krishnan, simply measuring the percentage of women hired provides little insight into whether women are able to thrive, lead and influence organisational strategy. “Hiring targets open the door, but without fundamentally rethinking evaluation, culture, and power, that door remains a revolving one.”

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Real challenge is in senior positions

The challenge of retaining women becomes particularly visible as they move towards senior positions, says Anusha Jaiswal, who runs a handloom startup in Kolkata. She had worked as a software engineer at Infosys for eight years, before starting her own venture. Jaiswal describes the problem as a systemic loss of women from the workforce rather than a failure to attract them in the first place. She says the reasons are closely connected to the unequal caregiving responsibilities women continue to shoulder. She explains how personal and profession is linked at each stage for a woman. “Women are disproportionately expected to take responsibility for childcare, eldercare and household work, while traditional workplace structures often offer limited flexibility,” she says. For Jaiswal, fixing this requires companies to rethink how careers are structured.

Career breaks should not mean career setbacks

For Sharonee Ghosh, who is the owner of a cafe in West Bengal's Uttar Dinajpur district, says that making workplaces more accommodating to women returning after career breaks is essential to achieving equality. Ghosh argues that a career break should not erase the skills and experience a woman brings back to the workplace. “Career breaks are interruptions, not endings.”

Krishnan backs her views and advocates a more flexible approach to career re-entry, including phased returns, project-based engagements, mentorship and upskilling opportunities tailored to women returning after caregiving responsibilities. “Returnship programs should become the norm.” But Krishnan also highlights that the issue extends beyond workplace policy. The unequal distribution of unpaid caregiving and the mental load associated with it remain major barriers. “The deeper challenge is the mental load, the invisible, unpaid labor of caregiving that disproportionately falls on women.” She argues that organisations need to recognise that professional and personal responsibilities cannot always be treated as separate worlds. “Until organizations acknowledge that work and home are not silos, flexibility will remain performative.” Ghosh also calls for caregiving to be normalised across genders and for women to be actively supported when they return to work.