A recent report posted on Business Standard reveals that India's women executive
directors are, on average, paid nearly 40% less than their male counterparts in
the same role.
The gap appears to be widening, shows a Business Standard analvsis of
salary data sourced from primeinfobase.com. While a male executive director on
average makes £7.6 crore at a company that is part of the Nifty 500 index,
comprising some of India's largest firms, a woman executive director earns an
average 34.8 crore. The average figure has risen at a 9.4 percent compound
annual growth rate for men in the past decade, compared with only a 1.8 per
cent increase for women, leading to a wider gap
Numbers have gone up since the Companies
Act 2013 mandated at least one woman director on each company board.
Promoter directors receive significantly higher pay compared to
professional directors.
"A majority of male executive directors are also promoters who tend
to reward themselves quite generously in comparison to professional directors.
This is not true for women, where a greater number of executive directors are
professionals," says Pranav Haldea, managing director, PRIME Database
Group.
Fewer women are in management roles in
India than in other countries. India is one of the major economies that
have seen a decline in the number of women in senior and middle-management
roles since 2019, according to data from the International Labour Organization.
The share of women in senior and middle management roles has declined to
13 per cent in 2024 from 17 per cent in 2019. Brazil has seen an increase to 39
per cent from 38 percent.
earlier, as has South Africa (36 percent from 33 percent) over the same
period. Russia, Germany, and Japan saw a decline of 1-2 percentage points.
The country has, however, managed to narrow the pay gap between men and
women.
By one measure in the Global Gender Gap
2024' report, released by the World Economic Forum last week earlier in
June, Indian women earned roughly 20.6 per cent of what men earned before the
pandemic. That has increased to 28.6 per cent now.
This is calculated using women's and men's shares of the economically
active population, the ratio of women's wages to men's (both indicators are
sourced from the ILO), gross domestic product valued at constant 2017
international dollars (IMF), and women's and men's shares of the population
(World Bank).
Women's earnings relative to men's in India are lower than in any of the
other top five economies. These are also lower than Brazil.
China, and South Africa among emerging markets. Data for Russia
isnavailable.