MUMBAI: A higher share of women in India is now seeking entrepreneurship opportunities as compared to men, despite the country having a disproportionately low representation of women in leadership in the workforce (18%), according to latest data from LinkedIn. The data, which was a part of the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, shows that the share of female founders grew by 2.68x between 2016 to 2021.
Comparatively, the share of male founders grew only 1.79x during the same period.
The report also reveals that the growth rate of female entrepreneurship was at its highest in 2020 and 2021.
Apart from being underrepresented in leadership roles, the data reveals that women are also not being promoted internally to leadership in companies at the same rate as men, with men being 42% more likely to be promoted into leadership positions than women.
This could explain why women in leadership roles also increasingly lag behind their male counterparts in the senior stages of their careers, with the proportion of women in the workforce decreasing along the corporate ladder. In India, the representation of female leaders drops from 29% at the senior level to a staggering 18% at the managerial level.