Ajay Vij has known his chairman and senior managing director at Accenture in India, Rekha M. Menon, for close to two decades. The managing director for geographic services identifies Menon as someone who can “break the paradigm and has the ability to take risks”. Vij can say that again. The hotel management graduate started his career with the Oberoi Group in the late 1980s. In 2001, he spotted an opening at a tech start-up and decided to give it a shot though he didn’t have the qualifications or experience for information technology. He landed a job at Talisma Corp, a customer relationship management firm, as director of operations for its outsourced services division. What he recalls most is that his interviewer, Menon, one of Talisma’s founding members, took a chance on him. “She looked beyond education and CV details, and saw skill and potential,” recalls Vij.

Vij later joined Accenture in India in 2006, two years after Menon started with the firm. Since then, he has seen Menon hold several leadership roles and turn what was a 2,500 employee firm into India’s largest multinational today. It has over 150,000 employees in India now. Menon has played a huge role in building Accenture’s business in India, a critical market which accounts for a significant chunk of the company’s global client base and serves as one of its key innovation centres.

Last year in July, Accenture launched its innovation hub, a first of-its-kind facility, in Bengaluru to showcase innovation in areas of new technologies across sectors. Today, more than 60% of Accenture’s global revenue (about $39 billion) comes from digital, security, and cloud businesses. Over the past 12 months, Accenture’s growth in India has been in double digits. “She (Menon) works no differently than a man,” says Vij. A contentious statement, but one that is echoed by Menon, 59, herself. “A leader is a leader… good or bad, irrespective of being a man or woman.”

Menon, ranked No. 17 on Fortune India’s Most Powerful Women in business list, is an oft-quoted example for her many achievements certainly, but also not insignificantly, due to the lack of many women in top leadership positions in the Indian information technology (IT) industry. And also because the industry in India is grappling with retaining women employees. The lack of women leaders is surprising as the technology sector is the second largest employer of women after agriculture in India and is one of the fastest growing industries, both in terms of production and exports. It has been a significant catalyst for growth—in 2017 it contributed 7.7% to India’s GDP. In FY18, India’s IT-BPO industry was pegged at $167 billion.

The IT-BPO industry in India prides itself on being gender-neutral, human resources (HR) consultants point out, because the focus has always been on skills. According to Indian IT industry body Nasscom’s Women and IT Scorecard-India 2018 report, the number of direct employees working in this industry stood at 3.97 million, making it India’s largest private sector employer. Women account for a sizeable 34% of that workforce. But their presence in the boardroom? Far from ideal. According to the Nasscom report, 88.5% of the companies surveyed said women make less than 10% of their C-suite. Things are not much better in senior management: 80% of the companies have a less than 10% female presence there. This is despite women with master’s degrees or PhDs outnumbering men with similar qualifications in the industry. This is surprising, for unlike other industries, IT is among the first sectors to not only focus on gender equality but also equal opportunities at work. This is especially true in tech multinationals with women at the helm.

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