A company can have respectable gender diversity numbers and still have a leadership problem. Women may be well represented among new recruits, yet remain scarce in technology, sales and roles carrying profit-and-loss responsibility. The numbers at the entrance look encouraging. Further up the organisation, the picture can be quite different.
TELUS Digital, which employs around 1800 people in India across its offices in Noida, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Mumbai, is looking more closely at that difference. Rather than relying on overall representation, it is examining where women work, how they progress and whether they receive the assignments that prepare employees for larger responsibilities.
“Employees who gain management experience early become candidates for larger teams and more demanding assignments.”
Deepika Pillai, VP-People & Culture, APAC & Africa, TELUS Digital
For Deepika Pillai, vice president for people and culture, APAC and Africa, the question extends beyond how many women an organisation hires. It is also about the opportunities available to them once they are inside.
Where the pipeline begins to narrow
The first promotion can have consequences that extend well beyond the new designation. Moving from individual contributor to manager gives an employee experience in supervising people, making decisions and taking responsibility for outcomes. It also creates a foundation for subsequent leadership roles.
TELUS Digital tracks how many women make that transition compared with men. The company is examining representation across managerial levels rather than assuming that a balanced entry-level workforce will eventually produce balanced leadership.
The distinction matters because career progression is cumulative. Employees who gain management experience early become candidates for larger teams and more demanding assignments. Those who remain in individual roles may continue to perform well without acquiring the experience expected at the next level.
Pillai is particularly interested in where women are positioned across functions. Representation in HR or other support roles does not necessarily translate into representation in sales, technology or positions carrying P&L responsibility.
These differences are not always the result of formal promotion policies. They can emerge from the less visible decisions that precede them.
A manager chooses someone for a difficult client assignment. Another employee is asked to lead a project. A third is given exposure to senior leadership. Over time, those experiences become part of the evidence used to assess readiness for promotion.
TELUS Digital is trying to make internal opportunities more structured and transparent, allowing employees to apply against defined criteria rather than depending entirely on being selected by a manager.
Pillai also believes that when few women apply for a senior position, the organisation should examine what happened before the vacancy arose. Were potential candidates given sufficient exposure? Did they know about the opportunity? Had anyone encouraged them to consider it?
By the time a promotion decision is made, much of the groundwork for that decision may already have been laid.
The difference between advice and advocacy
Corporate mentoring programmes are plentiful. Sponsors are harder to come by.
“Everybody can mentor, but how many are sponsoring you into getting those opportunities, getting more visibility, getting into those roles?” Pillai asks.
The distinction is important. A mentor can advise an employee on career choices, help develop skills or offer perspective on workplace challenges. A sponsor uses their own standing in the organisation to recommend someone for an assignment, introduce them to decision-makers or put their name forward for a role.
Both have value, but they do different things.
TELUS Digital is encouraging senior leaders to take a more active role in sponsoring women, particularly where greater visibility and business exposure can influence career progression.
Pillai also points to assumptions that can shape these decisions. A manager may presume that a married woman will not want to travel, or that a mother would be unable to take late-night customer calls. The employee may never be asked.
“Let the female decide, right? Why can’t somebody talk to her and ask her if she’s willing to do that?” she says.
Such assumptions can narrow the pool of candidates before anyone has assessed their interest or capability. The practical response is not especially complicated: discuss the requirements of the role with the employee rather than deciding on her behalf.
The company’s Connections forum brings together women leaders from different regions, senior executives and male allies to discuss career challenges, mentoring and professional visibility.
The forum creates opportunities for interaction across the organisation. The more lasting value of those connections will depend on whether they also help women gain access to assignments and decision-makers beyond their immediate teams.
A new divide in technology
The spread of AI introduces another question into the discussion about career opportunity: who gets access to the tools that are changing work?
TELUS Digital has developed Fuel iX, its proprietary AI suite, for use across functions including HR, finance, facilities and customer experience operations.
Pillai says her HR team has built tools that reduce the time required to prepare employee case histories from around 30 minutes to a few minutes.
The productivity benefit is one part of the story. The career implications may be less immediately visible.
As organisations integrate AI into everyday processes, employees who learn to use these tools can acquire experience that becomes relevant to new assignments and roles. Those who have limited access may find themselves at a disadvantage, even when their existing performance is strong.
Pillai argues that organisations should avoid restricting technology licences to particular employee groups or assuming that only certain functions need AI capabilities.
For women’s progression, the issue is similar to access to business-critical assignments. Opportunities to develop new capabilities can influence who is considered ready for future responsibilities.
Pillai also sees potential in AI-assisted interviews to make initial candidate screening more consistent. But technology cannot substitute for the commercial understanding, customer exposure and business judgement required in leadership positions.
Those capabilities still have to be developed through experience.
What the numbers reveal
TELUS Digital is examining several measures to understand how women progress through the organisation.
These include promotion rates, regretted attrition among high performers and workforce patterns across gender, tenure, level and managerial groups. Succession planning also looks at how many women appear among employees assessed as ready for critical roles.
Leaders are expected to examine representation at manager, team leader and director levels rather than relying on a single organisation-wide percentage.
The approach recognises that different numbers answer different questions.
Hiring data shows who enters the organisation. Promotion data shows who moves forward. Succession information indicates who is being prepared for future responsibilities. Attrition figures can reveal whether the organisation is retaining the people it hopes to develop.
Specific gender-disaggregated figures for promotions, retention and succession readiness were not available during the conversation, so the extent of TELUS Digital’s progress cannot be assessed from the information shared.
The measures nevertheless indicate what the company is trying to understand. A workforce can become more balanced overall while significant differences remain in the functions and levels where employees are positioned.
That is why representation alone offers an incomplete picture.
The decisions before the promotion
For TELUS Digital, the shift is towards examining the decisions that influence women’s careers long before a senior position becomes vacant.
The first managerial promotion matters. So does the difficult customer assignment, the opportunity to manage a business outcome, the exposure to a new technology and the senior leader willing to recommend someone for a larger role.
None of these decisions necessarily appears in a headline diversity figure. Together, they help determine who eventually occupies leadership positions.
It is relatively straightforward to count how many women an organisation employs.
Understanding why some progress further than others requires looking at how opportunities are distributed.
And that is a more revealing measure of what an organisation is doing about gender diversity.