I started a company in 2012, a radical consumer internet idea in India and had its share of supporters and naysayers. As I started to build the business, someone suggested YCombinator. As I looked up further details, one of the conditions was spending time in the US in person. As a founder with a toddler, this was one of the times I felt the system is designed to keep the non-default, similar-looking men of a certain age, race, background, in, and everyone else out. 

So I didn’t take the YC route, it felt deeply exclusionary, especially with my own demographic – a non-white middle-aged Indian woman with a child. While YC has become better and over time to time publishes gender stats of its batches, the ratio of men to women still hovers at around 10:1. And as you slice it further with women + race + ethnicity, the demographic is rather thin. 

This is not the only exclusionary route I have witnessed over a career spanning over 30 years. A founder pitched a Founder Residency product for women, since most startup residencies are a bunch of men living in a house, eating cup noodles and coding away. It might be a great movie scene to visualise, but it carries the invisible boundary of keeping anyone, particularly women who don’t blend in, out. 

I get the logic of economics and the market. I get the zone of building, the vibe, the growth-driven thesis. And as an investor, founder, and board member, I absolutely own them too. Excellence is imperative and the only way to achieve exceptional results in any field. The fundamental idea of containing in or keeping out is deeply institutionalised. It is not something one would think about in a normal way of things. The default setting is male, and that is part of the problem.

If the default founder is still imagined as unencumbered, male, mobile, and young, how many great companies are we losing before they begin? And how long will we confuse it with ‘market logic’ when it’s actually just legacy design?

I grew up in small steel plants across North India. A simple, easy childhood with books and open spaces for company in the backdrop of solitude and humdrum of factory campus life. In pre-Zomato, pre-eating-out world, we had guests at home often, mostly sundry visitors to the plant. My Dad led Sales and Contracts and invariably brought people home for lunch, usually unannounced. It was my mother who managed to set up a great lunch table every single time. More educated than him, she gave up her career so my father could have his.
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Most of the guests we had at home were men. However, there was one Ms. Veena, whom I remember as a rare woman visitor. The first time she came home was not to have lunch but to use the restroom. The steel plants did not have toilets for women. No one ever thought they could be needed. The said steel plant was set up by Kobe Steel in the early 1900s. The Japanese built it and ran it for over eight decades before an Indian enterprise bought it. Even with Japanese precision and planning, this detail went overlooked. 

And this impacted Ms. Veena, a rare woman engineer in the 80s, inspecting steel plants in UP and the back of beyond. Even in a plant built with meticulous planning, the absence of women’s toilets wasn’t considered a bug; it was treated as business as usual. As if women just didn’t exist.

‍The automatic exclusion or the invisible boundary of control was one of the childhood impressions for me of women facing a different reality in the workplace.

This is not something fixed over the years, though. I have spent a good part of my year in Japan this year and as a visitor to Japan for a large part of this decade, it is hard to ignore the reality of workplace design even in an advanced and prosperous country like Japan. About six to seven years ago, the only women you would meet were receptionists and secretaries. 

Today, while the receptionists and secretaries remain, you see more women than earlier in mid-tiers - managers, assistants, product managers, engineers, salespeople. However, you still don't see them as commercial or business heads. Or CXOs. The ones who get there, do it because they crossed the invisible boundaries set by the system. These are sometimes imports or super ambitious women who bring the extraordinary to the fore. Once you establish that it is not the people, but the system, you spot this boundary everywhere – from startup accelerators to office floors to factory campuses.

Power is the last thing to redesign itself.

The paradox of women-only spaces - bound by exclusion

The idea of women-only spaces is not new – some of the earliest women’s colleges started because the mainstream educational institutions were only for men. 

Wesleyan College (USA), the earliest women’s college, started as Georgia Female College in 1836, with the first female graduate in 1840. Around the same time, in 1837, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (USA) was established by Mary Lyon, and it is the oldest of the "Seven Sisters" and a major early women's college. You also have Newnham College, one of the first women's colleges at Cambridge University, offering women a path to education, though degrees came later in 1871. 

While these institutions were a hallmark of progress, it is difficult to overlook the institutional design of access that has impacted the lives of women, both historically and in the present. 

My own mother, who grew up in a small village in Punjab, was the first woman in an all-boys high school. She camped outside the Principal’s office to get herself admitted there. This was something that did not get enough attention, but was boundary-breaking in many ways – The idea of women hacking themselves into strong institutional structures not designed for them is possibly all represented across history. 

The institutional method of keeping women out is not new - it is industrial and global. When we track history, some of the earliest modern professional women were shockingly recent and revealing. Not even a century has passed for some of the first women we know. 

In medicine, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S. (1849). In computing, Ada Lovelace is widely cited as an early pioneer of programming. In aviation, Raymonde de Laroche became the world’s first licensed female pilot (1910). In science, Marie Curie changed the rules of discovery itself. In India, Savitribai Phule helped found one of the first schools for girls (1848), and Anandibai Joshi became among the first Indian women to earn a Western medical degree (1886). And in public leadership, Indira Gandhi remains India’s only woman Prime Minister to date.

The pattern is the same. A woman has to be exceptional to be accepted into education, work, and public life. The system was set up for them not to even dream of these opportunities, forget them making it through. 

I am the founder of consecutive women-only spaces, Fleximoms, SHEROES, Mahila Money – all platforms connecting women to the economic mainstream - employment, community, network, entrepreneurship, and capital. I have lived this paradox way too well. Women-only spaces allow for the acceleration of the individual without waiting for the institutional structure to change tracks. The life of an individual is short, and institutional change is long-term, often in decades if not in centuries. They are also safer, with less judgment and often more resources. When the mainstream won’t open the door, parallel doors get built. Some of them become the main entrance over time.

Exclusion or inclusion, depending on where you are watching from, is deeply personal at one level and highly structured and institutional on another. If the system’s default setting is male, then building for women isn’t exclusion, it’s correction.

These boundaries just don’t manifest in design or org structure. It also encompasses the way we live. For example, access to women’s reproductive choices is one of the deepest institutional boundaries – birth control, period poverty, reproductive rights –  all deeply personal but highly managed by political and economic frameworks of patriarchy, in a system designed by men, for themselves.  The right to access one’s own bodily choices is still a deeply contested issue, except in certain pockets like the Nordics or Northern Europe. America, Asia, Africa - all are embroiled in having control over women’s bodies like it is Oil or AI chips. 

While countries want to manage birth ratios in their favour, workplaces will penalise childbirth, maternity and career paths post maternity leave. 

Breaking the boundaries 

As an individual, changing a mammoth reality can feel daunting, almost insurmountable. But I’ve lived that exclusion, and I’ve lived the response to it.

And I can say this with confidence: if bias is both personal and systemic, change has to be too.

The world does not have a talent problem. It’s a design problem. The world hasn't built systems to expect and include brilliant women, and to offer them the resources needed to succeed. 

As I reflect on Ms Veena, an engineer who had to come to our home to find a restroom or my mother, who sat outside a principal’s office until the door opened - it is the same movie playing. Different decades, same pattern: women weren’t “kept out” loudly; they were simply not designed for.

That’s why I build. Because dignity shouldn’t be a special feature request. Basic access should be guaranteed. No one should have to be extraordinary to find a pathway to what is usual and common to many.

As I build Mahila Money, I often reflect on how microfinance, a 50 billion USD industry in India, 90 million borrowers and 146 million loans, is crafted as women-only spaces and disburses 90 percent of its capital only to women. The Self Help Groups became a safe community and learning spaces for women to find growth and capital together. A hack, if you will, into the bro club. Possibly the biggest one ever. A workaround, rather than a retreat. It is only ironic that the model worked so well, spawning a host of women-only models, including Asha Workers, Anganwadi and many more. 

If we really care about outcomes of success, particularly financial, because we do! Then we should care about designing these lines - the invisible boundaries. These boundaries that harm outcomes, reduce potential, and shrink our talent pools. 

So we must redesign, rebuild, and rethink. We must assume women are in the room. We must assume anyone with the capability has a door open. We must stop pretending merit is neutral when access isn’t the same. And we must build entries across levels into mainstream institutions until the “default founder or default CEO” expands to include everyone who can build.