By Maya Palit

We have talked about the efforts of Indian companies to include more women on their boards before, and concluded that they were inadequate.

Last year government data showed that several companies hadn’t complied with the Companies Act of 2013 which mandated that all companies were meant to have one woman director on their boards.

But according to Bloomberg, a recent study by the consultancy firm Deloitte LLP indicates that, in fact, India is doing pretty well compared to a host of other Asian countries, including Taiwan and South Korea. It has apparently made the most progress in ‘naming female directors’. Malaysia had the highest percentage of board seats held by women — 13.7 per cent — and India was at second place, with 12.4 percent.

Last year a KPMG survey deflated the news that the proportion of women directors in India had increased by 180 percent. It hinted that appointing more women could be perfunctory rather than transformative, and revealed that more than half the respondents felt that women were hired just to get companies off the hook, rather than from a desire to alter diversity within companies.

However, both the Deloitte study and another recent investigation by IIAS, which claimed that more than 60 percent of women directors on company boards weren’t related to anyone in the company, suggest that the situation for women in corporate spaces is improving.