Some years ago I sat through a signing. The promoter introduced his daughter-in-law to the other side in one line — “she helps with the office.”
Three hours. Not one question came to her. I could tell from her face that she had the sharpest reading of that transaction of anyone at the table. She never got to say it. When the papers were signed, she stood up and arranged the tea.
Somebody, twenty-five years earlier, had promised that woman everything.
• • •
The promise is real
I want to be clear about that. The day a daughter is born in a business family, sweets go around and somebody says it out loud — best school, best college, whatever she wants to study, abroad if she wishes. Total freedom. We mean every word of it.
We keep it, too. For about twenty years. School, marks, degree, and at every result the photograph goes into the family group with fourteen clapping emojis.
Then, somewhere around her twenty-fourth year, the vocabulary in the house changes.
Nobody calls a meeting. Nothing is minuted. “Career” becomes “till she settles down.” “Total freedom” becomes “we are very open, we let her work.” A first-class education becomes a line in the biodata — convent-educated, MBA, homely. Ask any young woman from a business family and she will tell you she felt it happen and cannot name the day.
Nobody broke the promise. We rewrote it.
• • •
And then she runs a home
I do not think that is a lesser thing. It is the opposite. Budgets, vendors, quality, staff, health emergencies, two sets of parents, school admissions, festivals. No designation, no salary, no leave policy, no appraisal. The Time Use Survey puts her at 289 minutes a day of unpaid domestic work against 88 for a man, and 137 more on care. That is a full working day before this country calls it work.
If that is not general management, tell me what is.
• • •
What we actually give her
Now the harsh part, and I have seen it too often to be polite about it.
We bring her into the business and we give her space. Only space. A cabin, sometimes a good one, name on the door. A visiting card. A chair in the meeting room. That is the whole of it.
No P&L. No target. No signing authority. No budget she can spend without asking. No salary worth the name — she is family, why salary? No reporting line anybody below her takes seriously.
Present in the room. Absent from the decision.
And then we sit back and form a view about whether she is any good. On what basis?
• • •
The harmless corner
Where do we park her? Accounts, or HR. Almost always, whatever her degree.
We think these are safe. Nothing much can go wrong there. Consider what that says about us — the place where the money is counted and the place where the people are hired, handed over precisely because we are certain nothing important happens in either.
Here is the joke, and it is on us.
One family I know well put the daughter-in-law into accounts because she was “only a B Com” and it seemed a harmless way to keep her occupied. Within months she had found serious lapses in the books, and behind them a trail of corruption running quietly for years. Nobody had ever bothered to look. She runs an independent business of that family today.
In another, a lady who had been a housewife her whole married life joined purchase — the one function every promoter privately fears. She rebuilt the planning and put in a supply discipline good enough to hold a contract with a medical chain, where a single bad consignment ends the relationship forever. She had been running procurement for a household for twenty-five years. Did we honestly imagine she would be bad at it?
A third put the daughter-in-law on customer care. The complaints desk. The least glamorous room in the building. She listened. Callers who had bought one appliance kept asking what else the company made, and grumbling about the three other brands cluttering their kitchen. She wrote it up and sent it upstairs. Nobody had thought to read the complaints book as a market study. That company is among the finest diversified home appliance businesses in the country today.
We put these women where they could do no damage. They did the most good.
Give a woman a corner and she will build something in it. Imagine what she does the day you give her authority.
And it is not luck. In three decades I have found three qualities again and again in Indian women — focus, hard work, loyalty. She does not get distracted. She does not count her hours. And she stays. I have not found those three sitting together as reliably in our highly qualified young men, and I have worked with a great many of them. Ask any promoter honestly, over a cup of tea, and he will admit the same. Then ask him why, knowing it, he still gives the daughter the cabin and the son the company.
• • •
The sentence nobody finishes
Now the real one. It is never said aloud, and it governs everything.
Our daughter may be brighter than our son.
I have sat through family settlements shaped entirely by that unstated fact. It surfaces as “he is the elder one,” or “she will anyway be busy with her own home.”
Understand the price of it. You are protecting your son’s ego with your own money, and one day he inherits a business half the size of what it could have been.
For the record: PRIME Database found that as on 23 February 2026, 98 per cent of the 2,285 companies on the NSE main board had a woman director, and women held 21 per cent of all board seats. Of those same 2,285 companies, 119 have a woman as managing director or chief executive.
Ninety-eight per cent compliance. Five per cent power.
That is not a statistic. That is a mirror.
• • •
Three things, and not one of them costs money
If she wants to build something of her own, back her completely. A woman who earns her reputation outside comes back carrying an authority you cannot hand to her across a dining table.
If she is inside the business, give her something real to run. A division with numbers attached. A market salary. A title people obey. And the freedom to fail — which is exactly what we grant our sons freely and withhold from our daughters entirely.
And put it in writing. Family constitution, shareholders’ agreement, succession plan. Not a warm speech at a wedding.
The law closed this argument long ago. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 made the daughter a coparcener, and in Vineeta Sharma (2020) the Supreme Court held she holds that right by birth. She already owns part of what you built. All we are deciding is whether to let her behave like an owner.
The day she was born, we promised her everything.
Walk down your own corridor tomorrow morning. Which room did you give her — and what did you put in it?
— Nitin
• • •
Connecting Dots
— every fortnight, I take a deal, a policy, or a person and tell you the thinking behind it. Insights and instincts.
I’m a corporate and M&A lawyer in Mumbai. For three decades I’ve advised global companies and their boards on coming into India, on joint ventures, and on mergers and acquisitions, and I still do. Busy as that keeps me, I always make time for younger professionals — through this letter, and through my conversations with law students — because staying close to young minds keeps me learning. If something here struck a chord, write back. I read every reply.