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Glass ceiling intact: Women make up only 4% of company Boards in India

This is despite a Sebi mandate of having at least one woman on the Board.

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Women make up just about 4% of corporate India's boardrooms.

Or, so it seems, going by the percentage of women who have applied to get their name registered and whose names appear on the directory of independent directors.

Despite the requirement that every listed and public company with paid-up capital of Rs 100 crore or more should have at least one woman director, as on March 4, women constitute just 4.4% or 759 out of 17,306 professionals whose profile have been uploaded in the database jointly maintained by the stock exchanges, BSE and NSE, and Prime Database.

"For any revolution to happen, you need to give it some time," Mamta Binani, President of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India, told dna reacting to the development.

Binani herself is somewhat a symbol of slow but gradual change in corporate boards, being the second women to get appointed as the head of the institution in its 47-year history.

"The numbers are low but acceptance has definitely improved. The requirement of compulsory induction of women on company Boards came just over one-and-a-half years back. So, I guess we need some more time to see some real changes in a country like India which is still patriarchal," Binani said.

The stock market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India, through a circular dated April 17, 2014, amended the provisions of Clause 49 of listing agreement relating to corporate governance, mandating that the Board of directors of listed entities would have an optimum combination of executive and non-executive directors with at least one woman director.

The response of women is more at the lower rung of the pyramid. And as the pyramid gets narrower, the share of women shrinks.

So, out of 759 women who have applied to become directors, 203 are chartered accountants, while just 25 are IIM graduates and 22 are former civil servants.

But there has been a welcome change in the mindset of corporate Boards typically headed by a male chairman, believes Binani.

"In the Boards where I have been inducted as a women director, there have been marked change in their acceptability of women and I haven't faced any kind of inhibitions or discriminations."

Binani is now much in demand these days and she is now serving the boards of seven companies including Century Plyboards and GPT Infraprojects.

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