Sushmita Chowdhary examines the enduring barriers women face in leadership, connecting India's historic women leaders, matriarchal traditions, corporate boardrooms, politics, and the military to reveal why equality demands structural change, not symbolic celebration.

There's a meeting happening right now in a glass-walled boardroom somewhere. Around the table sit twelve people. Two of them are women. One of them is presenting. She has the numbers, the strategy, the preparation, probably more than anyone else in the room. And yet, somewhere in that space, there's a quiet, unspoken current of doubt that she didn't create but has spent years learning to navigate. Nobody says anything. Nobody has to. The doubt sits there, like furniture.

Women have been leading, serving, building, and holding things together for as long as there have been things worth holding. They ran households, farms, schools, hospitals, governments, and armies, long before anyone thought to give them a title for it. The boardroom is just the latest room to take its time opening the door. And even when the door opens, there is often a second door nobody mentioned, and behind that, sometimes a third.

They Were Always There

Before we talk about percentages and policies, let us go back a little. Not to make a list of names, but to sit honestly with what women actually did when doing anything at all required a particular kind of courage that most people will never be asked for.

Rani Lakshmibai rode into battle at Gwalior in 1858 with her son tied to her back. She was twenty-two years old. The British officers who fought against her wrote about her with more honesty than the history that followed would. She was eventually turned into a symbol, which is what we tend to do with women when we are not sure how to fully reckon with what they accomplished. Symbols are easier. They don't ask for anything.

Sarojini Naidu was not simply a poet, though she was a remarkable one. She was a political organiser, a speaker of real force, the first woman to preside over the Indian National Congress, and later the first woman governor of an Indian state. She built coalitions, travelled constantly, argued publicly. And yet the first thing many people still reach for when her name comes up is the Nightingale of India. The bird metaphor. Beautiful and contained. Singing, not deciding.

Captain Lakshmi Sahgal led the Rani of Jhansi Regiment of the Indian National Army, serving as a doctor, an officer, and an organiser through some of the hardest conditions of the independence movement. She was captured, imprisoned, and then went on to practise medicine in Kanpur for most of her long life. She ran for President of India in 2002. She lost. She went back to her clinic the next morning.

These were not women waiting for permission. They were women who acted while the question of whether they were allowed to was still being loudly debated around them. The debate did not slow them down. That is the part worth remembering.

Stereotypes and Matriarchal Societies

There is a stereotype that refuses to die: women belong at home, and they cannot lead. It sits quietly in boardrooms, in villages, in family conversations, passed down as if it were simply the natural order of things. It was never natural. It was decided by people who benefited from that decision.

India itself proves the stereotype wrong, and not with theory, but with living societies that have worked this way for hundreds of years. In Meghalaya, among the Khasi and Garo communities, property and family name pass through the mother, not the father. The youngest daughter inherits the ancestral home and carries the responsibility of caring for her parents. Men marry into the woman's household. This is not a recent experiment. It has continued for centuries and it continues today.

In Kerala, the Nair community historically followed a similar system, where women held real authority over the household, the land, and family decisions. Children took their mother's family name, not their father's.

In parts of Nagaland, too, women have long held quiet but genuine authority within the family structure, managing land, resources, and decisions that shaped entire communities.

If women were truly incapable of leading, these societies would have collapsed generations ago. They did not collapse. Many of them still function this way today.

So the real question was never "Can women lead?" History already answered that, and these communities are still answering it. The real question is, why did the rest of us start pretending the answer was no?

Celebrating the Past, Ignoring the Present

Here is where things get uncomfortable.

We are genuinely good at celebrating these women. Their names go into textbooks. Their faces appear on postage stamps. We invoke them in speeches on national holidays. And then, without much pause, we go right back to running institutions where women today are underpaid, talked over, passed over for promotion, and quietly directed away from leadership roles because someone decided, without saying it plainly, that they were not quite the right fit.

That gap between honouring women in history and taking women seriously in the present is not small. It is where a great deal of the real problem lives.

Globally, women hold somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent of board seats in large companies. In India, the Companies Act 2013 requires listed companies to have at least one woman director. A legal mandate, not a suggestion. And still, in many cases, companies appointed a female family member of the promoter just to satisfy the requirement, not because they genuinely believed in what she brought to the table, but because the law said so. The gap between policy and genuine belief is where a lot of women have been quietly stuck for a very long time.

In Parliament, women hold roughly fifteen per cent of Lok Sabha seats. In a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, where women make up close to half the population, fifteen per cent of the legislative voice is what belongs to them. The Women's Reservation Bill, proposing 33 per cent representation, was first introduced in 1996. It passed in 2023. Twenty-seven years. For a number that is still not half.

In rural India, elected women sarpanches regularly report that village meetings are conducted with their husbands or male relatives because the men present simply will not accept that the authority belongs to her. She was elected. She holds the position. The conversation still happens around her.

What Actually Gets in the Way

The phrase "glass ceiling" gets used so often that it has stopped meaning much. So let us be more specific about what is actually happening.

The first problem is not access to jobs. It is access to the informal spaces where real decisions are made. A lot of what matters in corporate life does not happen in scheduled meetings. It happens at dinners, in corridors, in quiet conversations between two people after everyone else has left. Women are frequently outside those spaces, not always by design, but consistently enough that it shapes careers over years in ways that are hard to trace and harder to argue against.

The second problem is the credibility tax. A man walks into a room and is assumed competent. A woman walks into the same room, and the calculation runs differently. She has a narrow window to establish herself or lose the room's attention entirely. This is not an opinion. It is what women in senior positions consistently describe across industries, cultures, and decades.

Then there is the double bind. Too assertive, and she is called difficult. Too measured, and she is called weak. The range of behaviour that reads as acceptable leadership for a woman is genuinely narrower than the range available to men. And that range was not drawn with her in mind.

Underneath all of it is the domestic weight that career conversations rarely account for honestly. Even in dual-income households, women carry more of the caregiving, the scheduling, the invisible mental load of keeping a family running. A man can take an early morning call or travel for three days without it requiring much planning. For many women, the same thing requires a full support system to be in place before she can say yes. That imbalance does not disappear. It accumulates quietly and shows up eventually as a gap in seniority, in income, in how far she got.

The Military and the Weight of Being First

If the boardroom is one kind of difficult room, the military is another entirely. The institution was built around a very particular idea of who a soldier is. That idea did not include women. And yet they came anyway.

Women have served in the Indian Army Medical Corps since 1888. More than a hundred years of service, and the question of whether they could hold genuine command authority was not settled until the Supreme Court ruled on it in 2020. The court did not merely grant a permanent commission. It said explicitly that the arguments used against women in command roles, that troops would not accept them, that physical differences made them unsuitable, that family responsibilities would get in the way, were rooted in stereotype, not evidence. The bench used that word deliberately. In a judgment about the military. That was not a small thing to say.

What people consistently miss in this debate is that military leadership is not primarily about physical strength. It never was. A commanding officer's job is to make decisions under genuine uncertainty, hold a unit together when everything is pulling it apart, and communicate clearly when clarity is the only thing standing between order and confusion. None of that lives in a person's body. It lives in their judgment, their steadiness, their ability to read a situation and people at the same time.

Women who rose through military ranks did so in an environment that gave them no room for error. No gentle adjustment period, no senior officer who had been where they were, and always the quiet knowledge that if they failed, it would become evidence, and if they succeeded, it would be called an exception. Both outcomes carried weight that their male colleagues simply did not have to carry.

What emerged from that kind of environment was a particular quality of leadership: the ability to read a unit not just tactically but humanly, to sense when someone is struggling before it surfaces as a problem, to make decisions oriented toward long-term consequences rather than short-term appearance. These are not qualities that belong to women specifically. They are human qualities. Women developed them with more intention because the situation demanded it.

The harder question in all of this is not whether women are ready for command. It is whether the institutions are ready for them. The resistance is often not explicit. It lives in culture, in the half-second hesitation when a female officer gives an order, in the quiet assumption in some rooms that her rank means something slightly different than the same rank worn by a man. That hesitation belongs to the institution. But she is the one who has to stand in it and keep moving.

What Respect Actually Means in Practice

Respect for women who lead, in any field, in any form, is not a plaque or a ceremony or a speech on Women's Day. It is structural. It is what happens on a regular working day when nothing is being observed and no one is keeping score.

It looks like a female officer is being given command without anyone in the room quietly second-guessing the decision. It looks like a woman sarpanch being spoken to directly, not through the men sitting beside her. It looks like a female executive is being credited for the strategy she built, not the colleague who presented it after her. It looks like salaries that reflect actual contribution. It looks like promotion data is being tracked honestly and acted on when the numbers do not make sense.

The women who shaped this country, in independence movements, in wars, in village schoolrooms, in hospitals near the front, did not do it so that the women who came after them could be asked, generation after generation, to start again from zero and prove themselves to rooms that had already decided the answer before they walked in.

They did it so the door would stay open. Not for a few exceptional women who managed to get through despite everything. For every woman who came after them with something to contribute.

That work is not finished, not in the boardroom, not in Parliament, not in the barracks. The names have changed. The resistance has only gotten quieter.

And quiet resistance is still resistance.

She was never asking to be extraordinary. She was asking to be taken seriously. There is a difference, and we have spent too long pretending there isn't.