Biba calls out the 'lady' prefix, yet boardrooms leave women on the margins

A recent Women’s Day ad by apparel brand Biba asks why a woman is always professionally introduced with a prefix: lady pilot; lady cop; lady judge; lady doctor; lady boss. The tagline: drop the bias. While its obvious audience is customers, the more uncomfortable target sits in Indian boardrooms.

It is a conversation with deep roots. Back in 1995, Nike ran a spot titled If You Let Me Play, in which girls recited the statistical benefits of being allowed to play sport. The premise was arresting because the girls were asking for permission. Thirty years later, the women Biba’s ad references are no longer looking for permission. They are asking why they still need a label. The distance between those two ads measures genuine progress but the underlying power equation remains stubborn.

Sure, there is an evolution within Biba’s own storytelling that mirrors our messy transition toward equality. In 2016, the brand’s Change is Beautiful ad went viral. In it, a young woman prepares for an arranged-marriage visit by the wannabe groom and his family. The progressive twist was that her father asks if the boy can cook and look after the house. It was a hugely progressive ad, even if it stayed safely within the traditional Indian family architecture of the “ladki dekhna” ritual.

By 2026, the brand, which was itself founded by pioneering entrepreneur Meena Bindra, has moved from tweaking the traditional rules of Indian households to questioning the language of the workplace. That’s commendable. What isn’t is that the 2026 ad asks us to drop the prefix, while the corporate world at large is still designed around the very structures that make it de rigueur.

This tension is the defining feature of femvertising—the practice of deploying female empowerment as a marketing strategy. A study published in the Journal of Business Ethics examined 61 US companies that had won awards for female-empowerment ads and found that 81% engaged in fewer than 10 of 23 possible gender-equality corporate activities. It just reiterates how brands conveniently deploy empowerment to position products as the feminist option—a commercial objective masquerading as a progressive cause.

Nowhere is this more visible than in how companies treat women: as customers to be courted, and as leaders to be sidelined. Banks like HDFC, Axis, and ICICI all offer special Women’s Savings Accounts. Kotak Mahindra Bank calls its version Silk while IDBI calls it Super Shakti. Each comes with lifestyle benefits tailored to “her unique needs”. But is that about inclusion? Not quite. It is about margins. A 2025 study titled The pink tax in India: Empirical evidence of gender-based pricing disparities in retail markets, published in the Journal of Management Research and Analysis, revealed that female-oriented products were priced on average 19.4% higher than comparable male-oriented variants, with personal care items showing the largest markup of 24.2%. The logic is that women are a lucrative demographic to be profitably separated from the mainstream and sold a premiumised version of ordinary things.

Now look at what happens within the boardrooms of these same companies. According to a 2024 study by Fortune India and SP Jain Institute of Management, only 1.6% of Fortune India 500 companies have women at the helm. A February 2026 report by Prime Database is sharper: women hold just 10% of executive director positions across NSE-listed firms, and only 5% of listed companies have a female MD or CEO, with those leaders predominantly drawn from promoter families.

The board numbers, touted in every Women’s Day press release, are also revealing. Women hold around 21% of board seats across NSE-listed companies, but nearly 25% of independent directorships against under 20% of overall directorships. The nuance is important: independent directors provide oversight, but they do not run companies. In 2024, a study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) found that more than half of 1,400 NSE-listed firms had no women in their top management teams.

No wonder that proxy advisory firm IiAS calculated that at current rates, India will not reach even 30% gender diversity on boards until 2058!

The Biba ad urging us to drop the qualifier is a necessary nudge to our social vocabulary. But the harder task is for the companies watching it to abandon the double standard built into their own business models, specifically the assumption that a woman’s most useful role in the enterprise is as a categorisable consumer rather than a decision-maker.

In Company Outsider, Sundeep Khanna distills more than three decades of his experience writing on India Inc. into a thousand words of context and insights that few can bring to the table. Want this newsletter delivered in your inbox? Subscribe here.