What makes ONGC's first woman CMD more the exception than the norm

Rising share of listed public sector companies don't have a single woman director

Alka Mittal’s appointment as public sector major Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) chairman and managing director made her the first woman to head the company. Women rising similarly to top positions in public sector companies appear few and far between.

An analysis of past years’ data shows that public sector companies are less likely to have women directors on their boards. The gap with their private sector counterparts has only been widening.

Around 33.3 per cent of national stock exchange listed public sector companies lacked women directors in FY21 compared to 3.2 per cent of companies outside the public sector, shows data from primeinfobase.com.  The public sector has also had less success in raising women’s representation over time.

Around 46.3 per cent of listed public sector companies didn’t have a single woman director as of the financial year ending March 2015 (FY15). This improved in the intervening years. The share abruptly began to drop again from FY19. The share of private sector companies without women directors was already lower at 8.5 per cent of the listed space in FY15. They managed to more than halve it to 3.2 per cent as of FY21. The pandemic year saw an improvement in representation even as the public sector representation became worse.

The government decides on appointments to the boards of public sector companies which may have a bearing on their ability to close the gap, according to experts. The government has been slow on making such decisions. Mittal’s own appointment at ONGC came after her predecessor retired without a succession announcement by either the appointments committee of cabinet or the ministry of petroleum and natural gas.  Her predecessor Subhash Kumar was director (finance). He took additional charge as chairman and managing director after the last full-time head, Shashi Shanker, retired on March 31, 2021.

Another factor in have more women at top positions could be the number of them lower down in the organisation. Out of every 100 public sector employees, less than 10 are women. This has been more or less the same share of central public sector enterprise employment since at least FY12, shows a Business Standard analysis of annual Public Enterprises Surveys. The latest available one is for FY20.

It shows that there are 88,175 women employees in central public sector enterprises as of FY20. This accounts for 9.6 per cent of the overall employment. This is higher than 8.5 per cent in FY19, despite the number of women employees actually falling over the year. In fact there are now over 43,000 fewer women employed at CPSEs than was the case in FY12. The near constant share in total employment, barring minor fluctuations, comes because of an overall decline in public sector employment.

The total number of CPSE employees has dropped from 1.4 million in FY12. It is now under one million (9,19,648). This was the first time since at least FY12 that the total CPSEs employed fewer than 1 million people.

A number of major companies including Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) saw exits through the voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) route. Exits by women have mostly been at the lower end of the employment pyramid. The share of women in supervisory, executive or managerial positions have risen from accounting for 29.6 per cent of female employees to 42 per cent.