Closing the Gender Equality Gap Could Result in India's GDP Spike Bridging the gender equality gap and improving women's participation could result in an increase of India's GDP by 18 per cent, approximately USD 770 billion by 2025, according to Intellecap.

Bridging the gender equality gap and improving women's participation could result in an increase of India's GDP by 18 per cent, approximately USD 770 billion by 2025, according to Intellecap.

However, active participation of women in the workforce in the country has historically seen a steady decline over the years: 32 per cent in 2005 to 19 per cent in 2021, affecting women across a wide spectrum.

Kaynes Technology Limited, a technology product manufacturer based out of a tier-2 city like Mysuru, has seen success thanks to its product portfolio and an extensive emphasis on employee empowerment, especially in bringing about gender equality in terms of the workforce.

The company's success was followed by a mainboard listing in 2022, Savitha Ramesh, Kaynes' Chairperson said that the gender equality aspect runs in the company across all levels from management to the production floor.

Speaking in a panel discussion moderated by Punita Sabharwal, Managing Editor of BIZ Experiences India and titled 'From Tokenism to Transformation: Strategies for Lasting Gender Equality' at the Sankalp Bharat Summit, Ramesh said that the company had seen immense potential in its female workforce and that their internal studies have revealed 25 per cent more productivity across their 18 plans, thanks to the women workforce yielding better productivity than the male counterparts.

"We have to have a clear strategy on gender percentages in terms of hiring. We've started technological skill development for rural area women," added Ramesh.

Hama Makino, Senior Gender Policy Advisor at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), who was present on the panel, said that India is their largest market. "We've done a lot of work here and continue to do so," said Makino.

According to the DFC, while a majority of adults now have a bank account in India, 90 percent of female business owners in the country have never borrowed money from a formal financial institution.

Inititiatives from DFC alongside the United States Agency for International Development, include a USD 25 million loan portfolio guaranty with Kotak Mahindra Bank, enabling the lender to mobilize USD 50 million to non-bank financial companies (NBFCs) for lending to women borrowers or small women-owned businesses.

Rajat Arora, Principal Investment Officer and Head of Asia, Women's World Banking Asset Management (WWB) said that the initiatives are to enable a certain set of services more accessible to women.

Talking about bridging the employment gap in gender, "To hire women, you need to have a certain kind of environment and has to have a lot of women in the first place."

"We look at how job descriptions are being ruled out. How women are perceived," said Arora.