Women

Voices

The latest voices stories from the Women desk.

Neha Narkhede — The Pune‑Born Engineer Who Co‑Created Apache Kafka and Built a ₹70,000 Crore Tech Empire

From an engineering college in Pune to co‑creating Apache Kafka at LinkedIn and founding Confluent — a data streaming platform valued at over ₹70,000 crore — Neha Narkhede’s journey is a masterclass in technical entrepreneurship. This article chronicles how a young woman from Maharashtra navigated the male‑dominated world of Silicon Valley deep tech, co‑founded one of the most influential enterprise software companies of the past decade, and continues to reshape fintech security with her subsequent venture, Oscilar. We analyze her technical contributions to open‑source infrastructure, her leadership as CTO of Confluent, and her recognition as one of Forbes’ America’s Richest Self‑Made Women.

Women

Motherhood, Money and the Modern Indian Workplace: How Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership and Independence

Motherhood increasingly appears reshaping workplace leadership conversations, raising broader questions around financial systems, professional identity and how capability itself gets recognized.

Women

From a ₹7,500 Phone to a Crore-Rupee Empire: The Kaushalya Chaudhary Story

In 2017, a homemaker in a small Rajasthan village picked up a smartphone that cost ₹7,500. She had no formal business training, no investors, no pitch deck, and no idea what a "startup" even meant. All she had was a kitchen, a cardboard box stand, some aluminium wire, and a dream that seemed impossible in a village where women were told to stay indoors. Today, she is the founder of Sidhi Marwadi—a clean-food brand with 50 outlets, a turnover running into crores, and a global customer base. Her YouTube channel has over 1.6 million subscribers. Her products are reaching homes across the world. And she is empowering 35+ rural women—giving them jobs, dignity, and a future they never imagined. This is the story of Kaushalya Chaudhary. And it is a story that proves one thing: in India, if you have the will, even a ₹7,500 phone can build a crore-rupee empire.

Women

All-Female Founding Teams Received Just 2.3% of Global VC in 2024, Data Shows Persistent Funding Gap

New data shows all-female founding teams captured just 2.3% of global venture capital in 2024, even as female entrepreneurship rises broadly — a gap that highlights how far the venture ecosystem remains from parity.

Women

Nearly Half Of India's Recognised Startups Now Have A Woman Director Or Partner, Government Data Shows

Government data shows 1,02,054 of India's 2,12,283 recognised startups have at least one woman director or partner, with ₹2,995 crore in AIF funding for women-led ventures.

Women

The AI Shaping Billions of Lives Is Getting Women Wrong. UN Women Has the Numbers to Prove It.

Large language models consistently associate women with home, family, and children, and men with business, career, and leadership. In about 20% of LLM sentence completions beginning with a person's gender, responses exhibited sexist and misogynistic attitudes. Forty-four per cent of 133 AI systems showed gender bias.

Women

A Home in Her Name: How PMAY-U 2.0 Is Quietly Rewriting Women's Property Rights Across Urban Indi

For generations, property in India meant a man's name on the deed. PMAY-U 2.0 is changing that — one home, one woman, one title deed at a time.

Women

This Girls-First Hackathon Is Empowering The Next Generation Of Innovators

Girls-first hackathons are creating pathways into technology by combining coding, mentorship and entrepreneurship, helping young women build confidence and innovation skills early.

Women

Ghazal Alagh, Vineeta Singh, and the Deep Philosophy of the Unconventional Bet

One turned a mother's worry into a billion-dollar brand. The other walked away from a one-crore salary to build a cosmetics empire. Both made unconventional bets at moments when convention was screaming at them to stand down. We examine what their choices reveal about the nature of founder conviction — and what the Indian startup ecosystem must learn from it.