India’s largest IT firm said that in the fiscal year ending on March 31 (FY23), more women than men left the company with its return-to-office policy leading to a “reset of domestic arrangements.”

TCS chief human resources officer Milind Lakkad admitted the trend was unusual, but working in the office was necessary “to understand the company’s culture and for better collaboration among workers.” Understanding the company culture means listening to managers drone on in long pointless meetings about moving cheese, kicking the ball running, and leveraging things,

“There might be other reasons, but intuitively, I would think working from home during the pandemic reset the domestic arrangements for some women, keeping them from returning to office even after everything normalised,” Lakkad said in the company’s annual report released last week.

In December 2022, a Hurun report named TCS the biggest employer of women among the 500 most valuable companies. At that time, close to 35 per cent of the Mumbai-based firm’s employee strength of 613,974 comprised women at 210,000.

Lakkad pointed out that till the financial year 2023, the attrition rate among women had been lower or like that of men at TCS.

“The higher attrition among women in FY23 is a setback to our efforts to promote gender diversity, but we are doubling down on it,” he noted.

The Indian IT sector is criticised for its widening gender-based pay gap amid intense sexism. TCS, however, has clarified that it does not discriminate based on gender.