What years of conversations with Indian women leaders taught me about the difference between checking a box and actually being found.
A few years ago I started noticing something odd in conversations with women I admired. I’d ask how their week went, and somewhere in the answer, without me prompting for it, they’d mention being the only woman in the room again. Not angrily. Almost as an aside, like it was too ordinary to complain about anymore.
I kept hearing it. Founders, doctors, lawyers, professors, people running real teams and real budgets. Different industries, different cities, different ages. Same sentence, more or less: I don’t think anyone’s actually looking for someone like me.
That line stuck with me because it wasn’t about confidence. Every one of these women could talk for an hour about their work without hesitating. It wasn’t about capability either, their resumes did the talking. What they kept describing was something narrower and, honestly, more fixable: nobody had built a way for a stranger to find them.
Here’s the pattern I started noticing once I looked for it. An event needs a speaker. A panel needs a woman on it. A newsroom needs a quote. Someone adds one name, usually someone already on their radar, and the search ends there. Not because there was nobody else qualified. Because the box got ticked, and ticking it once felt like enough.
This isn’t just a feeling. A 2023 study of Indian STEM conferences found that 35 percent of them had lineups made up entirely of male speakers, despite women being present in the relevant academic fields in real numbers. Read more here: 2023 Study
The same pattern shows up in media. The Global Media Monitoring Project’s 2020 India report found that women made up just 14 percent of news subjects and sources that year, down from 22 percent a decade earlier. Read more here: 2020 Report
I don’t think this is anyone being deliberately unfair. It’s closer to a shortcut people take under a deadline. Finding someone new takes real effort, calling around, checking credentials, taking a risk on someone unfamiliar, and effort is the first thing that gets cut when time is short. So the same handful of women keep getting the call, again and again, while a much bigger group of equally capable women never come up at all.
I started building Draupadi on the Dias because I got tired of hearing this story and not doing anything about it. It’s a network of Indian women experts, and every single profile on it is reviewed before it goes live. The point isn’t to be a directory that just exists.
The point is that when an organiser or a journalist or a company actually goes looking, “I didn’t know where to find someone” stops being a real excuse.
It’s slower going than I expected, and I’ve made my peace with that. I say no to more applications than I accept because a list that lets everyone in stops meaning anything.
There have been stretches where that felt like the wrong trade, watching the numbers grow slower than they could have if I’d loosened the bar. But then a woman tells me, without me having to explain much, that this is exactly what she’s been missing, and I remember why the slowness is the point and not a flaw.
I haven’t cracked this. We haven’t placed someone from the network into a big speaking slot yet, and I’d rather say that plainly than dress it up as further along than it is. What I have gotten right, I think, is the diagnosis. This was never a shortage of capable women. It was a shortage of anyone building the bridge between them and the people looking.
If there’s one thing I’d want an organiser reading this to take away, it’s this: the next time a panel or a feature or a hiring shortlist has exactly one woman on it, that’s not the finish line. It’s the point where the real search should start.
Name: Anshika Kushwaha
Professional Title: The Panel Already Has A Woman. Why Does The Search Stop There?
Bio: I’m the founder of Decoding Draupadi and Draupadi on the Dais, a curated, verified network connecting India’s women experts with the people looking for them. I spent three years talking to women across industries about visibility before building it, and I now run both from Mumbai.
