In June 2025, the Wall Street Journal described corporate America’s diversity campaign as “going incognito”. Companies that once broadcast their DEI goals were quietly recasting them to avoid scrutiny from the administration, the courts and activist campaigns. Target dropped its DEI goals. Google dropped its diversity hiring targets. If you only read American headlines, you would think the work itself was over.
India is on a different curve. Avtar and Seramount have benchmarked the best companies for women in India for ten years. Across the companies they track, average women’s representation rose from 25% in 2016 to 36% in 2025. Women in leadership touched 20% for the first time, up from 13% a decade ago. The share of companies running formal sponsorship programmes grew from 45% to 71%. Second-career recruitment tracks for women returning after a break grew from 30% to 71%. This is not a market retreating. It is a market getting more systematic.
Even in America, the smarter finding got less attention. In July 2025, Dobbin and Kalev returned to Harvard Business Review with a follow-up: organisations can achieve DEI goals without DEI programmes. High-performance management, done properly, produces diversity as a by-product. Rigorous recruitment, skills training, mentoring, work-life support and fair decisions during cutbacks all raise representation without inviting backlash. The work was never the poster. It was always the practice.
There is one more thing worth retiring. About 80% of Fortune 500 companies justify diversity with a business case, arguing it helps profits. Researchers Oriane Georgeac and Aneeta Rattan made a simple point in HBR: no company feels the need to justify integrity or innovation that way. When diversity needs a business defence, the defence itself tells you something. In India, of all places, this should be obvious. A workforce that reflects the country is not a strategy slide. It is the country showing up to work.
So what should a DEI keynote speaker in India actually deliver in 2026? Not an imported argument about three letters. Three things, in order:
- Candour about the global noise, so the room stops whispering about it
- Fluency in the Indian numbers, so the conversation starts from facts
- Practices a leader can defend in a boardroom that has gone quiet
McKinsey’s 2025 research gives the starting point: women are 24% of managers in India, and across the three countries studied, roughly three-quarters of companies say their CEO prioritises gender diversity, but only 58% frequently track outcomes and just 15% hold their boards accountable for them. The policies that correlate with real progress are specific: sponsorship, flexible work and family care.
The acronym will keep changing. The companies that keep improving will be the ones that never needed the acronym to do the work.
Sutapa Sanyal keynotes on diversity, equity and inclusion for companies and industry forums across India, from the Embassy of Sweden and IKEA in New Delhi to Maersk’s Equal At Sea in Mumbai.
To invite her to speak, visit the diversity and inclusion speaker page.