A report by Great Place To Work India highlights the missing middle in leadership pipelines, showing women's representation drops sharply in mid-management due to life stages.

For a long time, the conversation around women at work has focused on one question: How do we increase their participation in the workforce? Few workplaces though, have effectively addressed the other half of this prominent question: How do we retain them and help them thrive? Do women have the same opportunity to get exposure, navigate critical life stages, take on career-defining roles and ultimately reach the top?

The true test of inclusion is not how many women are hired in an organisation. It is how many are able to keep progressing once they are there.

Women constitute one-fourth of the Indian workforce. But when we dive deeper into the data, we find that the representation of women is not uniform across all levels of the organisation. Most concerning is the "missing middle" in leadership pipelines, where women account for 33% of individual contributor roles, but representation falls to 22% at frontline management and just 16% in mid-management roles.

This tells us something important: the challenge facing leaders today is not merely improving women’s representation; it is ensuring that women can sustain career momentum through every stage of their journey. As ‘The Missing Middle’ report by Great Place To Work India highlights, women’s careers rarely follow a single, uninterrupted progression. Different career stages bring different forms of friction, and organisations that fail to anticipate them risk losing talent long before leadership opportunities emerge.

When organisations redesign their systems to hire, enable, and grow women talent, they create a great workplace for all. We have organised the women’s progression journey into three stages, each outlining what organisations must redesign to enable women’s growth. Stage One: Attracting and hiring women Many organisations have made meaningful progress in improving representation at entry levels. Hiring pipelines are stronger, awareness of gender diversity has increased, and companies are actively seeking women talent across functions.

Yet barriers still persist. Bias can enter the process through gendered job descriptions, assumptions about mobility requirements, career breaks, or the composition of interview panels.

Organisations that excel in hiring women approach recruitment differently. They design roles around capability rather than convention, implement structured assessment processes, use diverse interview panels, and ensure hiring decisions are informed by potential rather than stereotypes. Stage Two: Managing the collision zone The steepest drop in female representation occurs between early career and middle management. This is not coincidental.

For many women, these crucial years of career acceleration often overlap with major life transitions such as marriage, parenthood, caregiving responsibilities, and eldercare. This is what our research describes as the ‘collision zone’, where professional expectations and personal responsibilities intensify simultaneously. It is also where representation falls most sharply and where workplace experience gaps become most visible.

Too often, organisations interpret career interruptions as declining ambition. In reality, career aspirations rarely disappear. What changes is the level of support available to sustain them.

Best Workplaces respond by redesigning systems to enable women to manage the collision zone effectively. They invest in phased returns, smooth return-to-work programs, extended caregiving support, flexible work arrangements, and career systems that accommodate non-linear journeys without losing momentum or resetting the established career capital.

Just as importantly, they bring men into the conversation through paternity benefits and shared caregiving support, recognising that sustainable progress requires shared responsibility.

The Best Workplaces also recognise an important truth: flexibility is not a women's benefit. It is a workforce benefit. Designing inclusive policies for all employees creates stronger hiring outcomes for everyone.

Stage Three: Sustaining career to the top Leadership representation is the outcome of decisions made across earlier career stages. Decisions such as access to key assignments, P&L responsibility, visibility with leadership, advocacy for women in senior roles go a long way in determining future readiness of leaders to take up key roles. Organisations cannot promote women they have not consistently retained, developed, and prepared for senior roles. Without the right opportunities, succession pipelines remain weak.

Best Workplaces build readiness early. They make opportunity allocation visible, track access to high-impact assignments, embed sponsorship into leadership systems, invest in leadership development, and regularly review succession pipelines against measurable representation goals. Leadership accountability makes gender representation a business priority.

The missing middle is ultimately a fairness challenge Beneath representation lies a deeper challenge: equity of experience. Women are less likely to perceive pay, recognition, promotions, and opportunities as fair, while reporting greater challenges around decision-making, work-life balance, and flexibility.

To truly advance women’s careers, organisations must look beyond headcount and measure experience. Representation shows who is present; experience reveals who feels included, who can progress, and ultimately, who gets to lead. The future lies not only in helping women adapt to workplaces, but in redesigning workplaces around the realities of life. Because when workplaces are designed for careers that evolve, for shared caregiving and for genuine equal opportunities, we do more than advance women. We create a much larger social impact and inspire the next generation of women in the workforce.