who we trust with power

Last August, Priya Nair became the first woman CEO of Hindustan Unilever in the company's 92-year history.

It took 92 years for India's largest FMCG company, one that reaches 9 out of 10 Indian households, to put a woman in charge.

When the announcement came out, LinkedIn did what LinkedIn does…
"Glass ceiling shattered!"
"Women can do anything!"
"Historic moment for India Inc!"

I was one of the people celebrating, but something kept nagging at me afterwards.

India has 54.2% women teachers as of 2025. We trust women to shape every child's mind in the country. 

Nursing is almost entirely female. We trust women to keep us alive in hospitals. 

Women-led Self Help Groups maintain over 96% bank repayment rates, outperforming corporate India's loan default rates by a wide margin.

So we clearly trust women with children, health, and money management too.

As of the latest PRIME Database data, only 5% of India's listed firms have a woman MD or CEO.
Women hold just 18.3% of senior leadership roles in corporate India. 

And 63% of companies have zero women in key managerial positions.

We trust women with the most important aspects of life: Children, health, family finances. 

But the moment the job title changes from "teacher" to "CEO" or "director" to "board member," that trust seems to disappear.

I wanted to understand why. Like, really understand what's going on in our heads when this happens.

In 2002, psychologists Alice Eagly and Steven Karau published something in the Psychological Review that gave this pattern a name: Role Congruity Theory.

The core idea: we all carry mental templates for different roles.

"Leader" has one template. "Woman" has another.
When the two don't overlap, our brains generate resistance.
We don't think women are less capable. The categories just don't match in our heads.

This resistance shows up in two ways.
First, we evaluate women less favorably when they're being considered for leadership roles.
Second, when women do lead and display decisive, assertive behavior, we judge that behavior more harshly than the identical behavior from a man.

Think about the roles where India overwhelmingly trusts women: teacher, nurse, caretaker, mother. 

Psychologists call these "communal" roles. Warmth, nurturing, cooperation.

Now think about the roles where women are still rare: CEO, founder, investor, board chair. These are "agentic" roles. Assertiveness, ambition, risk-taking.

The problem isn't that India doesn't trust women. The problem is our brains have filed "woman" and "leader" in separate categories. And when someone doesn't fit the category, we feel friction before we've even processed “why”.

This is why it probably took 92 years for HUL to have a woman at the top. Not a shortage of talent but instead a shortage of pattern-matching.

I run a university and invest in startups. Women in entrepreneurship is something I actively care about and work toward. So I assumed I'd be immune to this.

Nothing about her profile suggested that was a better fit. My brain was just pattern-matching based on category, not capability.

I caught it, didn't act on it. But I kept thinking about how fast my brain made that call. 

I hadn't even processed it consciously and the decision was already half-made.

And once I noticed it, I started seeing it everywhere.
The way pitch meetings go differently when a woman founder walks in versus a man.
The kinds of questions they get asked.
The way "aggressive" is a compliment for one and a concern for the other.

Eagly and Karau's research shows this isn't individual prejudice. It's a pattern our brains learn from decades of seeing who occupies which roles.

Every time a child sees women as teachers and men as principals, the template gets reinforced.

Every family dinner where the mother manages the household budget but the father makes "investment decisions" strengthens the filing system.

The research is clear on one thing: these templates aren't fixed. They update when they encounter enough exceptions.

Eagly's own follow-up work found that in environments where female leadership is common, the bias weakens significantly. The brain rewrites its categories when the evidence forces it to.

And India is generating more of that evidence than ever before.

Priya Nair running HUL.
Leena Nair leading Chanel globally.
Falguni Nayar building Nykaa into a ₹50,000 crore company.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw making Biocon a global biotech force.
Roshni Nadar chairing HCL Technologies.
And so so many more!!

India's female labor force participation jumped from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24. SHG women manage over ₹1.7 lakh crore in loans with near-perfect repayment.

None of these women needed the world to lower the bar. 

They just needed to be seen for what they could do, instead of being sorted into a category before they'd even walked into the room.

Every woman who leads visibly, whether she's running a Fortune 500 company or a village SHG, is doing something beyond her own job. 

She's rewriting the template in the head of every person watching.

Women’s Day is on Sunday, so…

What's one role where you instinctively expect a man? Think about it honestly. Hit reply and tell me.

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. HUL's stock has done well since Priya Nair took over. Turns out markets don't care about mental templates. They care about results.