New Delhi, April 4 -- Few Indian women have stormed the male bastion of manufacturing as forcefully as Lila Poonawalla. She managed this feat not in the diversity-conscious 2020s, but through the gritty, grease-stained decades of the 1970s and 80s, an era when women were expected to grace the arts or, at most, the perceived soft corridors of HR or marketing.

In 1967, among the first women to graduate in mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), Poonawalla was a statistical anomaly. Even today, women occupy around 20% of the seats in the premier IITs, with branches like mechanical and civil engineering remaining overwhelmingly male. The numbers in the corner office are even bleaker, with the manufacturing sector...