Rethinking Women's Day Beyond Tokenism

In four decades across boardrooms, investment committees and leadership roles, I have watched Women's Day evolve from a quiet acknowledgement to a corporate production. The panels have multiplied. The hashtags have proliferated. The flowers arrive reliably. And yet the numbers — of women in revenue-accountable roles, in succession pipelines, in rooms where consequential decisions are made — have moved with frustrating slowness.

That gap between celebration and reality is where the real conversation about women's leadership needs to happen.

The first shift I would urge is deceptively simple: ensure at least half the participants in every Women's Day event are men. This will strike some as counterintuitive. But gender equity cannot advance through conversations held largely among women. A women-only room signals, however unintentionally, that this is the women's agenda — not the organisation's. The people who control promotions, compensation and succession must be in that room, not outside it.

Women do not lack ambition or capability. What they often lack is a system that reads their choices fairly and evaluates their performance without bias. That is the harder truth, and it takes years of close observation to fully appreciate.

Consider what bias actually looks like in practice. It is rarely a dramatic episode. I once watched a female colleague — accomplished, senior, entirely at ease in the room — ask a pointed question during a fundraising pitch. The founder, without seeming to notice, directed his answer to the male partners at the table. My colleague pointed it out with calm precision and a touch of humour. No rancour, no confrontation. The room shifted. The founder was visibly startled. He hadn't realised he was doing it. Bias exists in almost every organisation. The harder question is whether those with the power to interrupt it are paying attention.

That moment has stayed with me because it captures something essential: bias operates below the threshold of intention. It accumulates in who is heard, whose ideas are credited, who gets described as "ready" for a stretch role. These are not isolated moments. They are a pattern, and over the course of a career, that pattern shapes trajectories in ways that are difficult to see and hard to reverse. Noticing these moments — and correcting them in real time — is what allyship actually looks like.

When I wrote Leadership Beyond the Playbook, I included a chapter on women's leadership deliberately in a book for all leaders — because the readers who most need to understand these dynamics are not only women. The conversation cannot remain a parallel track. It has to sit at the centre.

That is equally true of sponsorship, which is where I have seen the most consequential change happen — and the most consequential inaction.

Mentoring programmes are well-intentioned and useful. But mentorship offers guidance; it does not open doors. Sponsorship is different. It is when someone in authority puts their own credibility on the line — recommends a woman for a role she hasn't yet been considered for, ensures her name surfaces in succession discussions, advocates for her in rooms she isn't in. It is the difference between someone who advises you privately and someone who advocates for you in the rooms that matter most. That advocacy carries reputational risk for the sponsor, which is precisely what makes it consequential.

In my experience, the organisations where women have risen furthest are not necessarily those with the most programmes. They are the ones where senior leaders — men included — have actively championed women's advancement. Not out of obligation, but out of a genuine understanding that overlooking half your talent pool is not neutrality. It is a strategic failure.

Gender equity is not a women's issue. It is a leadership issue. Organisations that understand this stop treating Women's Day as a moment of tribute and start treating it as a moment of reckoning.

The women are already doing their part — navigating complexity, building careers, leading with resilience and ingenuity. The question Women's Day should force organisations to answer is simpler and more uncomfortable: are the systems around them worthy of that effort?

On 8 March, may the flowers continue. But the real test comes on 9 March — and every day that follows.

This article is authored by Roopa Kudva, author of Leadership Beyond the Playbook. She headed Crisil and ONI.