Recent analyses from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) paint a dual picture of women's progress in the global workforce: while participation and leadership roles are expanding, fundamental gender gaps remain stubbornly wide.
Global Progress in Leadership, Uneven Across Ranks
The ILO's 'Women in Business and Management: Scaling Success' report indicates an improvement in women's representation at the top tiers of enterprises over the last decade. The share of companies with a woman CEO climbed to 28.2% in 2025, up from 23.4% in 2013. Similarly, the proportion of enterprises with a woman board chair reached 30.9% in 2025, a significant jump from 13.1% in 2013.
Despite these advancements, women still hold less than a third of all managerial positions worldwide. The report notes an uneven distribution of progress; while senior and top management levels saw improved gender balance between 2013 and 2025, representation declined at junior and middle management levels.
Enterprises are increasingly recognizing the value of gender equality initiatives. In 2025, 68.5% of businesses reported positive outcomes from such efforts, an 11.1 percentage point increase since 2018. Companies led by female CEOs were 6.4% more likely to report better business outcomes, a figure that rose to 17.5% for those with a female board chair, underscoring the strategic benefits of diversity.
Persistent Structural Barriers
Despite women globally outpacing men in higher education—46.4% of women attended university in 2023 compared to 40.3% of men—these educational gains are not fully translating into equitable labor market outcomes. Women remain under-represented in critical sectors like STEM fields, comprising only about 35% of tertiary STEM graduates worldwide.
Only 48.6% of women are economically active, and while the number of women employers has nearly doubled in 30 years, they still account for just 22.8% of business owners. This disparity points to enduring structural constraints, including occupational segregation, unequal care responsibilities, and societal norms that hinder career progression.
India's Participation Paradox: Quantity Over Quality
In India, the ICRIER report, 'The Participation Paradox: Women’s Work and Time Use in India 2017-18 to 2025', highlights a sharp increase in female workforce participation, with the number of women workers doubling from 104 million to 201 million between 2017-18 and 2025. The worker population ratio for women rose from 22% to 38% during this period.
However, this expansion has been overwhelmingly rural and largely absorbed by the agriculture sector. The growth primarily occurred in own-account and unpaid family work, with the share of regular salaried jobs for women actually declining. Where women did enter manufacturing and services, they tended to cluster in low-productivity, informal segments such as garments, textiles, and domestic work.
The report also found that the surge in participation was concentrated among rural women in prime and mid-age brackets, widening the rural-urban divide among women. Marriage continues to influence workforce exit, with 87.6% of married men participating in the workforce in 2025 compared to only 37.3% of married women, although this 'marriage penalty' shows signs of loosening.
Furthermore, average weekly work hours fell for all groups, with the steepest decline for rural women. This suggests an expansion into increasingly marginal, low-intensity activities, indicating that the quantity of female employment has grown at the expense of its quality. Time Use Survey data reveals women perform approximately 3.5 to 4 hours more unpaid work per day than men, a gap that widened in the care dimension between 2019 and 2024, coinciding with the participation surge.