Women in India's GCCs: The Next Generation of Global Leaders

By: Shivali Chakravarthi - Managing Director, Operations, Marsh India

India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) ecosystem has undergone a significant transformation, evolving from traditional back-office and support operations into strategic hubs for innovation, technology, product development, analytics, and global business transformation. India now hosts more than 2,100 GCCs, with the ecosystem increasingly contributing to enterprise-wide decision-making and global mandates.

As the role of GCCs expands, so does their importance in developing the next generation of global business leaders. Global leadership roles based in India have grown at around 40 percent CAGR over the past five years, reaching more than 6,500 roles in 2024, including over 1,050 women leaders. Yet, women continue to account for a smaller share of senior leadership positions than their overall representation in the GCC workforce. Recent industry estimates put women at around 40 percent of the GCC workforce, while their representation narrows considerably at senior levels.

This makes the question of women's progression particularly relevant as GCCs move closer to the centre of global strategy. The challenge is no longer simply creating opportunities for women to enter and grow within GCCs, but ensuring that they receive the mobility, sponsorship, strategic exposure and decision-making authority required to progress into global leadership roles.

Shivali Chakravarthi, Managing Director, Marsh Operations, Global Capability Centre, Marsh India, is a seasoned operations leader with more than 25 years of experience across banking, financial services and insurance. During her career, she has led client-facing, back-office, customer service and international operations across organisations including Marsh India, Jardine Lloyd Thompson, ICICI Bank, Orange, Capita and Prudential. At Marsh India, she has held leadership roles spanning international operations, fiduciary operations and employee benefits.

A strong advocate for women in leadership, Shivali brings her experience of building and leading global operations to the conversation around women's career progression in GCCs. In this viewpoint, she examines whether India's growing GCC ecosystem is genuinely creating a pathway for women to become global leaders or merely expanding the pool of skilled women professionals. She explores the importance of mobility, sponsorship, stretch assignments, senior exposure, and measurable leadership outcomes, while arguing that women's leadership cannot remain an HR initiative. For Shivali, building the next generation of global women leaders must become an integral part of business strategy, succession planning, and leadership capability building.

Will Women in India’s Global Capability Centres Become the Next Generation of Global Leaders?

The role of Executives working in India's Global Capability Centres (GCCs) has evolved significantly in the past decade. They now own product roadmaps, run global budgets, and make decisions that shape enterprise strategy well beyond India's borders. What gets talked about far less is what this evolution means for who ends up leading these centres, and specifically, whether the sector's unusually strong gender balance at entry level is converting into a genuine cohort of women leading global mandates from India. This is no longer a question HR can answer on its own. Business leaders must include this in the same conversation as succession planning and leadership capability evaluation, because that is exactly what it is.

Are Leaders Building a Pathway, or Just Expanding the Pool?

Here is the question worth sitting with as GCCs take on more decision-making authority: is this genuinely opening a route to global leadership for women, or is it simply widening the pool of skilled women professionals without shifting where these professionals eventually land? The distinction matters more than it sounds, and where organisations are deliberate about it, the answer leans toward the former.

The mandate of a GCC today looks nothing like just back-office engines. Centres are being handed real accountability over businesses, product lines, functions and client relationships, and that changes what is genuinely on offer for the people inside them. Women in these roles are increasingly shaping strategy, sitting closer to governance and budget decisions, and weighing in on business risk, the kind of exposure that builds judgment, not just technical depth. Judgment, as it happens, is precisely the capability that scales worst and matters most as work gets automated around it.

Why Mobility & Sponsorship Matter for Women’s Leadership

Mobility is what makes this real rather than aspirational. When a woman can move from a GCC role into a global team, and that move is treated as leadership experience rather than a sideways step, the centre stops being a holding pattern and becomes a genuine builder of enterprise careers.

Sponsorship matters just as much, arguably more. Mentorship helps someone find their footing. What changes a trajectory is a senior leader putting their own credibility behind a specific person, opening doors, visibility, and stretch assignments that would otherwise stay out of reach. That must be something senior leaders actively do, not something they merely endorse from the sidelines.

None of this means much unless it shows up in outcomes. Women progressing into leadership, taking on global assignments and assuming roles carrying real decision rights are the indicators that count. Managers reporting high hiring numbers and training completion rates are activities and not evidence of real change.

Building Women Leaders Through Sponsorship & Exposure

Mentoring efforts and initiatives aimed at women, including dedicated support for those returning after a career break, have been running for several years. The early signals are encouraging higher engagement, better retention of experienced women, more internal movement, and more women stepping into roles with wider scope.

The harder work now is tightening the link between these programmes and leadership outcomes that can be presented as evidence of progress. That means going beyond mentoring to build real routes to sponsorship, visibility, and the stretch work and senior exposure that gets someone noticed for the right reasons.

Tracking this through indicators such as how often people move internally, how quickly promotions land, whether women return to and stay in the workforce after a break, and how many of them ultimately earn leadership seats. Alongside that, there should be a deliberate effort to give women the kind of assignments that typically precede enterprise leadership: cross-functional projects, strategic initiatives, and work shaping how the operating model runs globally.

Why Women’s Leadership Must Be Part of Business Strategy

Initiatives aimed at women cannot sit apart from how a business builds its leaders. They must be built into that strategy directly. The measure of success is women taking on roles with genuine scope and authority, including P&L ownership and enterprise-wide mandates, not a longer list of senior titles with limited decision rights attached.

Why Business Leaders, Not HR Teams, Must Solve This

Organisations have grown comfortable treating talent risk as background noise, something HR manages quietly while the board focuses on strategy, capital and competitive positioning. That comfort is misplaced, and GCCs make the case plainly.

Global stakeholders increasingly tie a centre's credibility, the depth of its succession bench, and the retention of senior women to whether its top executives reflect the workforce beneath them. Managers allowing a pipeline to quietly narrow at the point of global exposure are not simply missing a representation metric. It is a leadership capability gap in the making, one that surfaces at the worst possible moment, when a senior role cannot be filled from within, and global stakeholders start asking why.

The Real Test: From Representation to Decision-Making

Whether the sector builds the next generation of global women leaders will not be decided by the depth of India's talent pool. That was never in question. It will be decided by whether organisations govern the pipeline with the same intent they bring to every other capability they consider mission-critical, and by whether they measure what matters: women achieving progression, scope and decision-making responsibility, not activity dressed up as progress.