Fund the programme, run it well, and three years from now the senior numbers will look roughly as they do today. Not because the programme did not work. Because a meaningful share of the women it was designed for will have left the organisation before they ever became eligible for it.
Most women’s leadership programmes in India are built around the move from manager to senior manager or above. Reasonably so. It is the step where the numbers thin out, and it is where our global reference points tell us to look.
In the Indian context, I think we are arriving several years too late.
The break that happens at return from maternity
The maternity transition removes women from the pipeline before the promotion gap can be measured on them.
Not always at the point of leaving. Very often at the point of coming back, and often not immediately. A woman returns, finds her portfolio has been redistributed and only partly returned, discovers that the interesting project went to someone available in month four, and stays another eighteen months before concluding that the trajectory has changed. That exit gets recorded as a personal decision, and in one sense it is. But the conditions were set in the first ninety days after her return, by an organisation that was well-intentioned but simply had no architecture for the transition.
Run a leadership programme for manager-level women in an organisation with a weak return-to-work design, and a meaningful share of your talent has already left that population before becoming eligible. The sequencing is off, and it is off in a way that is very hard to see from inside an annual plan, because the two things are usually owned by different people and reported in different packs.
I would go further. In some organisations I have worked with, the single highest-return leadership intervention available was not a leadership programme at all. It was a structured, staged, properly resourced return.
The second break nobody plans for
There is a later one, and it gets discussed far less.
Care obligations for parents and parents-in-law arrive for many Indian women in their forties. That is precisely the decade in which the move into genuine senior leadership happens, when travel increases, when roles become geographically spread, when the job stops fitting neatly into predictable hours.
What the organisation observes at that moment is a capable woman becoming less available and less forward-leaning. What the organisation records is a mid-career decline in ambition. What is actually happening is a capacity constraint arriving from multiple obligations, at the worst possible moment, in a culture where that particular obligation is normalised and therefore not planned for.
We have built some vocabulary around maternity. We have built almost none around this. And so it goes unnamed, gets misread as motivation dip, and quietly ends careers that had another fifteen years in them.
Why this keeps getting misdiagnosed
Both of these are capacity constraints. Both get filed as motivation and ambition problems.
It is the same error we make with first-time managers, where we look at someone drowning in a new role and conclude they were a wrong decision. The solution provided in training. The training is necessary to help them with the transition, but it will work only if systemic barriers are removed as well.
A capacity constraint cannot be trained away. It can only be designed around, and designing around it needs ownership and effort.
What I would check before starting anything
Before the next women’s leadership programme is signed off, three things are worth knowing.
Where your women actually exit, plotted against the maternity transition rather than against level. Not attrition by grade. Attrition by months since return.
What happens to a returning woman’s portfolio, and who owns getting it back. If the answer is her manager, and nothing checks whether it happened, then the answer is nobody.
And whether anyone in your organisation has ever asked a woman in her forties what she is carrying at home. Not in an engagement survey. In a conversation, by someone who could actually do something about the answer.
None of this is a reason to stop running leadership programmes. They matter and done properly they change trajectories.
But if you can walk into your next planning conversation with attrition plotted against months since return rather than against grade, you will be holding something far more persuasive than a programme proposal. You will be holding a diagnosis, and the investment case tends to make itself after that.
Find the leak first. Then decide what to build.