At Birlasoft, an Indian IT services firm, 177 of 180 women who went on maternity leave last year came back to work, a 98% return rate the company reached through deliberate effort rather than policy alone, according to its own account reported by HR publication HRKatha. Across the rest of the Indian IT sector, 30 to 40% of women on maternity leave simply do not return, the same report notes.
The gap between the two, not the hiring number companies publish every year, is where Asia’s diversity story actually gets decided. Representation charts measure who walks in the door at entry level. They ignore long-term retention: who remains five years later, after the single life event that quietly drains more women from pipelines than hiring policies can ever replace.
Measuring the Wrong Moment
Aon’s 2024 Voice of Women study, which surveyed 24,000 women across more than 560 Indian companies, found that 75% of working mothers reported a career setback of one to two years after returning from maternity leave. Close to 40% said the leave itself hurt their pay. None of that shows up in a graduate hiring ratio or a boardroom representation chart, both measured at points in a career that most women have not yet reached.
What Actually Closes It
Birlasoft’s own account of its return rate is instructive because it was not a communication campaign. The company says it stays in structured contact with women throughout their leave, protects their role and project assignments, and manages the handover back deliberately rather than leaving it to chance. It points to a broader lesson for employers: retention often depends on operational processes built around the transition, not simply policies written around it.Â
Asian HR leaders should stop publishing representation numbers without a return-to-role and retention rate alongside them. Track what happens to every woman in the twelve months after she comes back from leave, not only how many were hired the year before alongside other metrics. A hiring chart that ignores the exit nobody discusses is not evidence of inclusion. It is evidence of where a company stopped looking.
