WLC, a women’s leadership and professional community, is launching its Delhi chapter after four years in Mumbai.

Updated on: Sep 19, 2026, 18:46:24 IST

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For Jaya Mehrotra, founder of Women Leadership Circle (WLC), the next step after four years of building the community in Mumbai was not simply to take it to another city. It was to create deeper spaces for women to build influence, wealth and leadership. She believes, Delhi is an important part of that journey.

WLC, a women’s leadership and professional community, is launching its Delhi chapter after four years in Mumbai. While the organisation had initially considered Bengaluru and Dubai as its next destinations, Mehrotra says Delhi became difficult to ignore.

“More than the numbers, you can't be an ecosystem without being in the cultural capital of the city, the culture and the political capital of the country,” Mehrotra said. “And Delhi is the heart of India, while Bombay is the financial capital and Bangalore is a tech capital. So these three cities are very important to our overall roadmap and our next three-year vision.”

But the Delhi expansion is also about what WLC believes is missing from the existing ecosystem, particularly for women who are already established in their careers and are looking to move into more influential positions.

Mehrotra is careful to distinguish WLC from a conventional professional network.

“We don't call ourselves a network,” she said. “We are not solving for breadth, we are solving for depth.”

The organisation, she said, is focused on creating smaller, curated rooms rather than large networking events.

“If you still look at the top 20 most influential people in India from a business families perspective, or from people, angel investor perspective, it's still men, even in politics,” she said.

Why women are still dropping out

Mehrotra believes one of the biggest problems with the way organisations approach diversity and inclusion is that women's careers are often expected to follow the same trajectory as men's.

“Women's career cannot look like men's career, right? Because they are very different,” she said. “Women are equally ambitious, equally capable, but they have different life stages.”

At WLC, she said, the intention is to recognise those stages rather than treat career breaks as a loss of talent.

“We want to honor those life stages, we want to manage their talent around those life stages,” she said. “And we want to see a woman in her entirety, and not just in her 30s or 40s, or when she's a VP or an AVP, because a woman has a lot to give even post 50s and 60s.”

She argues that the conventional corporate view of career progression often fails to account for what women bring back after these life stages.

The challenges, however, are not limited to workplaces. Mehrotra also sees a gap in how women approach their own leadership journeys, particularly entrepreneurship and board positions.

“Most of the women of my generation, which are the 1970s or the 80s born, whatever they're doing, are they doing for the first time?” she said. “Nobody in their family or around them has, they don't have a role model.”

She believes this creates a tendency among women to seek additional validation before taking on leadership positions.

Mehrotra also addressed the capital challenge. “I've seen repeatedly access to capital for women founders to scale up is lower,” Mehrotra said. “For every VC transaction, the valuation given to women's business is lower.”

She also pointed to what she described as systemic assumptions around women, including the belief that pregnancy or family responsibilities could affect their businesses.

What WLC wants to build

Looking four years ahead, Mehrotra wants WLC to expand beyond Mumbai and Delhi into Bengaluru and eventually across South Asia.

“I think Narendra Modi has a 2047 or 2040 as a developed country. And that cannot happen till women are actively participating in the GDP,” she said.

But her ambition goes beyond financial participation.

“A lot of time, a lot of times we are told constantly that women should be financially literate. I said, no, well, women have to be generational wealth creators,” Mehrotra said.

Her target for WLC is to have at least 100 women in the community who have scaled businesses to at least a million dollars, “if not unicorns.”

Why Delhi?

The Delhi chapter comes with its own professional ecosystem, but Mehrotra believes the needs of women are ultimately similar across cities.

“Communities are what make village, what make women thrive. We all need our own village, our circle, our tribe,” she said.

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