Shop floors hosting more women than board rooms

Britannia Industries aims to have 50% women in the factory workforce by 2024, up from 38% at present. However, a tougher and more aspirational task for the company will be to have a higher representation of women on its boards. Britannia has only one woman director on its board of 11 members. That's a poor representation of 9%. The issue is similar across most of its peers in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, an industry that has traditionally targeted women consumers.

HUL, the market leader, has two women directors on its board of 10 members. In 2021, the company had set a target of hiring 2,000 women on the shop floor over the next three years in some of its most remote locations.

Marico, which grew from a small regional oils business to an emerging market multinational, has only one woman director on its board of 10 members. Cigarette-to-FMCG firm ITC has only two women directors on its large board of 16 members, as does Emami.


Dabur India has only one woman director on its board of 14 members, while Tata Consumer Products has one woman out of its seven directors. P&G India has two women on its board of 11 members.

For companies, it is easier to target increasing women's representation at the lower shop floor level than increasing it at the top echelons of decision-making. However, some FMCG companies are better than others at getting more women's representation at the top. These are mostly the ones with women at the top executive seat.

Godrej Consumer Products, led by a woman executive chairperson, has five women directors on its board of 12 members. Colgate-Palmolive India, which recently announced the appointment of a woman CEO and had a woman CEO in the past, has four women on its 11-member board.

Jyothy Laboratories, with a woman managing director, has three women on its six-member board, while Nestle India, too, has three women on its eight-member board.

Aspects such as ESG (environment, social and governance) norms and business responsibility reporting are prompting companies to adopt a top-down approach to become more gender-inclusive.

"If an effort is made, women can be hired at all levels," said Shriram Subramanian, founder of InGovern Research Services. "However, the number of women available at the CXO level is relatively lower. Since the pool is not large, it will take a long time to have enough women at CXO levels."

According to Milind Sarwate, an independent director on several boards, it is difficult for companies to get women directors on their boards, although he said the degree of difficulty is reducing at a good clip. "Statistically, we would have an inadequate number of eligible women to choose from, since the base number of women at senior positions in business is low. Boards in India have tended to be 'male' places and the dominant male perspective may cause some issues."

"We are not in a situation where we recruit a set of people for board roles and then find that at least one of them is a woman. Most companies tend to look for a woman director rather than look for a good director who happens to be a woman. The 'reservation' of that one seat occupies undue mind space, and the qualities that women bring to the board are not necessarily the first recall," Sarwate added.

Recent research by Professor Jie Chen, Woon Sau Leung and others cited in the Harvard Business Review has shown that having women on the board helps temper the overconfidence of male CEOs, improving overall decision-making for the company.