The Top 25 Women in India - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The top 25 range across all generations and are in fields as diverse as tractors to hospitals to banking.

• How long it will take till a list of the top 250, and not just 25, is viable depends as much on how India builds it family care infrastructure as anything else. “Today, if the child of a working couple falls ill or is let out from school early, or if the babysitter goes on French leave, who has to miss office? No prizes for guessing the correct answer.”

• From Amrita Patel, Chairman of NDDB, the national dairy board, to Zia Mody, Senior Partner, AZB & Partners, the list is in a sort of alphabetical order.

Why, despite these 25, so few Indian managers are women

The list

• Saris and salwar kameezes predominated at the Mumbai party to fete the 25 Most Powerful Women in Indian Business, but otherwise, the honorees were little different from their Western counterparts.

• Shelly Lazarus, outgoing Chairman & CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, honoured the women. The Ogilvy veteran of 35 years has been on Fortune magazine’s list of 50 Most Powerful Women in Business ever since the American magazine’s first such list, in 1998.

• The list, the overall head of Business Today noted, is a quarter to almost a third fresh from the previous top 25.

• One participant, amid chatter about how financial professionals predominate on the list: “If a few of these good women were calling the shots at those troubled banks, perhaps we wouldn’t have had such a crisis in the first place.”

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