As India steps up its push into artificial intelligence, cloud platforms and digital infrastructure, executives in cybersecurity and enterprise technology say the country’s ambitions will depend not only on investment and policy support but also on whether companies can widen access to leadership and specialist roles for women.

The argument, voiced by senior women in security and infrastructure as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, reflects a broader concern in the technology sector. India has built a large pipeline of technical talent, but industry leaders say the challenge now is ensuring that workforce development keeps pace with a threat landscape that is becoming more complex and more automated.

Praniti Lakhwara, chief information officer (CIO) at Zscaler, said India’s AI expansion is being driven by a clear policy push and a fast-changing technology ecosystem, creating opportunities across citizen services, financial inclusion and enterprise productivity.

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But she said the same forces that are expanding digital opportunity are also increasing risk.

“As adoption scales, so does complexity and the attack surface grows right alongside it,” Lakhwara said, adding that trusted, AI-enabled security and a future-ready cybersecurity workforce are essential if India is to sustain digital growth with confidence.

Her comments come as organisations face a dual pressure. On one side, businesses are being pushed to innovate quickly across hybrid systems, distributed workforces and growing volumes of data. On the other, cyber attackers are using automation and AI to act faster, conceal their methods more effectively and target organisations at scale.

In that environment, Lakhwara said, security is no longer only a technology issue. It also requires leadership and talent that can assess risk strategically and make decisions around resilience and trust.

She argued that representation matters in cybersecurity because diverse teams are better able to challenge assumptions and anticipate threats. Women, she said, contribute perspectives that are valuable across areas including risk assessment, policy, user-focused design and decision-making under pressure.

Lakhwara said barriers for many women in the sector are often less about capability than access, sponsorship and visibility. She pointed to Zscaler’s Women in Zscaler Empower, or WIZE, initiative as an effort to address that through mentorship, career support and leadership development.

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She also linked inclusion to the wider issue of talent supply, saying India’s digital ambitions require broader pipelines of skilled professionals. Zscaler’s recently launched AI and Cyber Threat Research Center with Bharti Airtel, she said, is intended to support research and help train the next generation of security talent.

A similar line of thinking is emerging in digital infrastructure, where companies are dealing with long investment cycles, high operational demands and systems that are expected to run continuously.

Pooja Vashisht, head of marketing and communications at Techno Digital, said the logic of infrastructure planning should also apply to leadership design. In technical environments where redundancy is built in to reduce operational risk, she said, organisations should be equally deliberate in creating opportunity and reducing exclusion.

“Infrastructure, we design redundancy to eliminate risk. In leadership, we must design opportunity to eliminate exclusion,” Vashisht said.

She said inclusion in infrastructure is not a separate social objective but a business consideration. Teams responsible for power systems, capacity planning, risk management and strategy perform better when they reflect a wider range of expertise and experience, she said.

For Vashisht, mentorship, sponsorship and exposure are practical tools rather than symbolic gestures. When women are given stretch assignments, operational authority and measurable responsibilities, she said, companies do more than support individual careers. They strengthen how the organisation functions.

She said gender equity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics would not be solved by visibility alone. Instead, progress would depend on whether women gain access to core technical functions, leadership pathways and decision-making forums, including the boardroom.

In industries where resilience is treated as a design principle, Vashisht said reciprocity should be approached in the same way. Deliberate investment in women through trust, responsibility and opportunity, she said, can produce more consistent execution and stronger innovation over time.

The issue is not confined to India. Mandy Andress, chief information security officer (CISO) at Elastic, said the drop in women’s representation between graduation and senior technical or executive roles remains a global concern, even in countries such as India where women account for more than 42 percent of STEM graduates.

“This discrepancy represents a massive, untapped capability at a time when the world urgently needs skilled technologists,” Andress said.

Speaking from the perspective of a security leader, she said equity in STEM is not simply about fairness. It is tied directly to resilience and the future supply of innovation. In fields such as cybersecurity and data science, she said, diverse teams tend to build stronger and more dependable solutions, which is increasingly important as economies become more dependent on digital systems.

Andress said expanding access to mentorship, advanced training and leadership roles for women would help strengthen both industry and society by building confidence among emerging professionals and improving the quality of technical decision-making.

Executives pointed out that as India expands its digital infrastructure and accelerates AI adoption, the question for employers is not only how quickly they can deploy new technologies, but whether they can build the talent base needed to secure and sustain them.

That includes preparing for a cyber environment in which threats evolve quickly, creating systems that allow more women to move into specialist and senior roles, and treating inclusion as part of operational design rather than a peripheral initiative.