There is a structural reason the board numbers have moved faster. The legal requirement for listed companies to have at least one woman director has made board representation a visible and measurable compliance issue. In FY2025-26, only 23 of 1,008 companies reporting board composition had no woman director. But 473 companies, or nearly half, had exactly one.<br><br><!– PROMOSLOT_M –><div class=” article-detail-ad-slot=”” captionrendered=”1″ data-src=”https://etimg.etb2bimg.com/photo/134786238.cms” height=”442″ loading=”eager” src=”https://hr.economictimes.indiatimes.com/https://hr.economictimes.indiatimes.com/https://hr.economictimes.indiatimes.com/images/default.jpg” width=”590″>
That raises a different question: has board diversity moved beyond compliance, and is the same momentum reaching the leadership pipeline below the board?
The BRSR data cannot answer that completely. But the gap between women’s share of employees and their share of KMP suggests that representation at the top remains significantly thinner than representation in the broader workforce.
More women, but not necessarily better jobs
Headcount alone also hides a second shift: the kind of jobs women are taking.
Across the 757 companies tracked over four years, the number of women increased by about 426,000. But 53 percent of that increase came through other-than-permanent roles.
The share of women employees and workers in non-permanent positions rose from 15.5 percent in FY2022-23 to 23.3 percent in FY2025-26.
Men also saw an increase in non-permanent employment, from 31.3 percent to 38.3 percent, suggesting that part of the change reflects a broader shift in how companies are structuring work. But the gender dimension still matters because job security, access to benefits and routes to promotion can differ between permanent and non-permanent employment.
Among workers, where the BRSR category captures much of the shop-floor and plant workforce, women’s share of permanent roles actually slipped from 15.2 percent to 15 percent, while their share of non-permanent roles rose from 7 percent to 8.4 percent.
The question for employers, therefore, is no longer just how many women they employ, but what kinds of jobs those women occupy and how often those jobs lead to more secure and senior roles.
The pay gap is moving in the wrong direction
This is the sharpest contradiction in the data.
Among 562 companies that reported employee pay by gender in all four years, the ratio of women’s median pay to men’s median pay fell every year: from 0.931 in FY2022-23 to 0.909, 0.889 and finally 0.881 in FY2025-26.
In other words, the typical woman employee was earning 88 paise in median pay for every rupee of the median pay of a male employee, compared with 93 paise four years earlier.
The decline was not confined to a handful of companies. The ratio fell in 319 of the 562 companies tracked.
Across all reporting companies, the proportion where women’s median employee pay was below men’s also increased from 62 percent to 68 percent. Median pay increased for both groups, but men’s rose faster: from ₹5.59 lakh to ₹6.98 lakh, compared with ₹5.50 lakh to ₹6.24 lakh for women.