Women in the Workplace 2025: India, Nigeria, and Kenya

Since 2015, McKinsey, in partnership with LeanIn.Org, has conducted annual original research on women’s participation in the formal workforce in the United States and Canada through the Women in the Workplace report series. This report extends that pioneering research to new countries—India, Nigeria, and Kenya—for the first time, addressing a major data gap and deepening our understanding of women’s representation in the formal sector in these critical markets.

Our analysis in this report is based on data from 324 organizations, which together employ about 1.4 million people across India, Nigeria, and Kenya. This research revealed that across these countries, women are far from achieving parity in representation and face systemic challenges that prevent them from reaching leadership roles at scale. However, the challenges they face differ across countries, indicating an opportunity for these countries to learn from each other—such as how to attract more women into entry-level positions or how to remove women’s barriers to promotion into management and senior leadership roles.

Below, we explore women’s representation across formal sector pipelines in each country and in specific sectors, the policies and practices that are affecting gender diversity, how the organizations are tracking progress and holding leaders to account, and some steps that could accelerate progress.

Three steps can help organizations accelerate progress

By following three sequential steps, employers can create and successfully implement policies that work to accelerate progress toward advancing gender equity:

1. Diagnose. Only two-thirds of companies surveyed track gender inclusion metrics. To understand how to improve gender diversity, organizations need to pinpoint where issues lie in the pipeline and determine if the challenges are related to attraction, retention, or promotion at each level where representation is low or where there is a notable drop. This will allow organizations to craft targeted strategies for improvement and best use scarce resources to move the needle on women’s representation.
2. Design. Leaders should find out what, if any, differentiator policies the organization has in place as well as the uptake and utilization patterns of the policies to determine if they are reaching the intended segments of employees and achieving their objectives. Once they understand this, leaders should consider additional policies they could put in place to address the identified challenges and close remaining gaps, then consider experimenting with approaches that are more innovative.
3. Monitor. Policies alone do not create impact; their success relies on effective implementation and ongoing evaluation, but only 15 percent of boards have established accountability mechanisms that include gender diversity metrics. Employers need to treat gender diversity initiatives as a strategic priority just as they would any other business imperative, by actively tracking progress and holding leaders accountable.