Jaya Mehrotra, Co-Founder of Women Leadership Circle (WLC), and Sunny Bhasin, CFO, WLC, speak to Woman’s Era about women’s changing ambitions, why careers need not follow a straight line, the importance of relationship capital, investing in oneself and building an intergenerational ecosystem of women leaders.
For generations, professional success has been imagined as a ladder: study, enter the workforce, rise steadily through the ranks and eventually reach the top. But women’s lives have rarely fitted so neatly into that linear model. Parenthood, caregiving, marriage, health, personal transitions and changing ambitions often alter the pace of a career without diminishing a woman’s capability to lead.
For Jaya Mehrotra, Co-Founder of Women Leadership Circle, this understanding is deeply personal. Raised as an Army child across different parts of India, she entered professional life assuming that ability mattered more than gender. Years in banking, however, exposed her to a more complicated reality. Pregnancy affected the timing of a promotion, while personal changes made her conscious of how women could be judged differently in the workplace.
Years later, after transitioning into leadership coaching, those experiences became part of the thinking behind WLC—an ecosystem designed to move women beyond conventional networking towards influence, opportunity, leadership and wealth creation.
Alongside her is Sunny Bhasin, CFO, WLC, whose own unconventional journey spans finance, filmmaking, corporate leadership and executive coaching. Together, they believe the future of leadership lies not in asking women to fit old systems, but in creating structures that recognise the whole person.
Q. Jaya, your early life was quite different from the gendered professional world you eventually encountered. How did your journey shape the idea behind WLC?
Jaya Mehrotra: I grew up as an Army child and lived across different parts of India. That upbringing made me adaptable and independent, but more importantly, I did not grow up thinking very consciously about gender. You were expected to participate and perform irrespective of whether you were a girl or a boy.
When I entered banking, I gradually realised that the world was not as equal as I had imagined.
I got married, had my daughter and began seeing how motherhood could affect a woman’s professional journey. I believe one of my promotions was delayed because of my pregnancy. Later, while going through a separation, I was also conscious of whether discussing it openly could affect how I was perceived in terms of promotions or compensation.
Those experiences stayed with me. I knew women needed an ecosystem that could support them through different stages of their professional and personal lives.
Later, when I became a leadership coach and worked with people across different countries, I realised these issues were not unique to India. The context changes, but women everywhere are often navigating career structures that were historically built around a very different life pattern.
Q. How do you define success for women in the 35-to-55 age bracket, particularly when traditional career milestones may no longer be enough?
Jaya: Success means different things to different people, but for many women, success is much broader than a designation.
A woman may care deeply about professional achievement, but also about her physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, her family, her children, her partner or her creative potential.
For me, success is being able to be more than one thing.
A woman should not have to reduce herself to the title she carries in an organisation. She can be a CXO and a mentor. She can be an entrepreneur and a mother. She can have a demanding career and still pursue something meaningful outside it.
That is one of the changes we are seeing now. Women are beginning to define success for themselves rather than simply accepting the definition that existed before them.
Q. You often speak about women’s careers as a spiral rather than a ladder. What does that mean?
Jaya: A ladder is straight. You move from one rung to another, and professionally that has traditionally been seen as the ideal trajectory.
But a woman’s life may not be straight.
There can be pregnancy, childcare, caregiving responsibilities, health changes and different family stages. A woman may slow down in her forties because her children need her more and then experience completely renewed ambition when they become independent.
Why should that period of slowing down be interpreted as the end of ambition?
A woman can return at 45 or 50 and become a CXO, build a company, join boards or pursue several professional interests.
So instead of expecting women to fit a straight career ladder, we should accept the idea of a spiral career. You continue moving forward, but there can be curves, pauses and accelerations along the way.
Q. Guilt has often accompanied women through these transitions. Do you see younger women responding differently?
Jaya: Very much so.
Women from earlier generations were conditioned to carry a great deal of guilt. You somehow felt that you had to be available to everybody all the time.
But nobody can be 100 per cent everywhere.
Even personally, I have had to learn to say, “I am not available right now.” Earlier, I might have felt guilty doing that. Today, I am more comfortable compartmentalising.
What I find encouraging about women in their twenties and early thirties is that many of them carry less guilt around their choices. They are choosing marriage differently, looking at conventional family structures differently and building businesses at a much younger age.
They have also grown up with more visible female role models.
Sunny Bhasin: That is important because women are increasingly realising that nobody is simply going to give you the life you want.
First, you have to acknowledge what you want. Then you have to create it.
When women see other women who have taken that pause, made a decision and built the life or career they wanted, it creates a powerful peer-learning effect.
Q. WLC positions itself as something more than a professional networking platform. What is the difference?
Jaya: We began very simply—by getting women around a table and talking about leadership.
What was fascinating was the range of people in the room. You could have a woman in her twenties building her first business and someone in her seventies building another venture.
But we realised very quickly that women do not just need networking. They need relationship capital.
Men have historically been very effective at turning professional relationships into opportunities. They invest together, recommend one another for board seats, make introductions, build businesses and put money behind other people in their networks.
Women need to become equally comfortable doing that.
If an opportunity is not meant for me, can I open that door for another woman? Can I recommend someone for a board? Can I connect a founder with an investor?
That is when networking becomes influence.
Relationship capital creates influence, and influence allows women to participate in decisions that shape careers, organisations and businesses.
Q. Sunny, your own journey moved from finance to filmmaking, back to corporate leadership and eventually coaching. How has that influenced the “whole-self” philosophy you bring to WLC?
Sunny: I grew up in Delhi in a joint family with two elder sisters, so I was surrounded by women from childhood.
Professionally, though, I followed the conventional route. I became a Chartered Accountant and joined Nestlé. I did very well and had international exposure, including projects in Switzerland.
But there was always a creative side to me.
At one stage, I told my father that I wanted to pursue filmmaking. What I really remember is his response. He did not want me to work only for money. I explored filmmaking for about a year and a half, and later returned to corporate life with Godrej Consumer Products.
Even there, alongside finance, I found myself making films, hosting events and doing creative things.
Eventually, I moved into a CFO role, and the work became more hardcore finance. Professionally it was successful, but I had less time for the other parts of myself.
Later, after moving back to Delhi and through the COVID period, I finally decided to listen more closely to myself. I trained as an ICF coach and realised that coaching was a natural extension of how I led people.
I also realised there had been many moments in my life when I had not listened to what I actually wanted.
That is why the idea of the whole self is important to me. Finance is part of me. Creativity is part of me. Coaching is part of me. Family is part of me.
Leadership becomes stronger when you stop pretending that only one part of you is allowed into the room.
Q. If WLC is focused on women, where do men fit into the conversation about creating more women leaders?
Sunny: Men absolutely need to be part of the conversation.
WLC creates spaces for women leaders, but we are not saying men do not need leadership development. In fact, one of our verticals, Village, looks at leadership journeys in a gender-agnostic way.
Men are also dealing with changing careers, AI disruption, pressure and the need to reinvent themselves.
At the centre, human emotions, decision-making and the need for self-awareness are not completely different.
Jaya: And structurally, if we want change, we have to change the bench at the top.
If the same kinds of people continue occupying the highest decision-making positions, organisations will change very slowly.
More women need to be in places where they influence hiring, promotions, board appointments, capital and strategy.
But it is not just about asking somebody to promote women. We also have to build women’s capacity to navigate those spaces confidently and sustainably.
Q. We are seeing more women move into entrepreneurship. Where does the real challenge begin?
Jaya: Scaling.
Starting something is one challenge. Taking it from the initial stage to a sustainable, scalable business is a completely different one.
And scaling is difficult for every entrepreneur.
That is why we talk about scalable leadership.
It can mean scaling your own leadership, scaling your career or scaling your company.
Once a founder moves beyond the early stage, she needs to understand teams, systems, capital, governance, strategy and how to build something that can grow beyond her individual effort.
We are also seeing women entering entrepreneurship later in life. A woman may slow down in her forties and build her most successful venture after 50.
There should be no expiry date attached to ambition.
Q. How important is financial confidence for women, particularly when they move into leadership or entrepreneurship?
Jaya: Extremely important. Women need to become wealth owners.
We often talk about getting more women into CXO roles, and that is necessary. But wealth ownership changes power much more fundamentally.
Women need to build generational wealth, make investment decisions, run family offices, invest in companies and become owners.
When women control capital, they can influence which ideas receive funding and which people get opportunities.
We are also building a community of women investors within the WLC ecosystem.
Sunny: And alongside external investment, there has to be internal investment.
People spend extensively on how they look or on external markers of success, but are they equally willing to spend on their own learning, coaching, leadership capability or self-awareness?
Successful leaders continually invest in themselves.
Women need to feel equally entitled to do that.
You cannot build sustainable leadership if you continuously invest outside yourself but neglect what is happening inside.
Q. WLC is now also building a next-generation chapter. How important is intergenerational mentorship to the ecosystem you want to create?
Jaya: It is extremely important.
Our core focus includes women in roughly the 35-to-55 stage, but we also have women in their twenties and early thirties building remarkable businesses.
We realised we could not ignore that generation.
So we are developing a next-generation chapter where a woman at 55 can mentor a woman at 25 or 26, open doors for her and help shorten her learning curve.
At the same time, the younger generation brings a very different understanding of entrepreneurship, technology, marriage, family and life.
We even have examples within the community where a mother is preparing for board roles while her daughter is building a D2C company.
That is the kind of intergenerational ecosystem we want.
Sunny: Interestingly, we did not necessarily begin with the intention of creating every programme we now have.
Women came to us and told us what they needed.
Our approach is to listen, curate and build frameworks around those needs. Many of our programmes and intellectual properties are being shaped with the women leaders themselves.
That creates depth.
When we began expanding from Mumbai into Delhi-NCR, members from Mumbai travelled simply to support the new community and share what they had experienced over the previous three years.
Nobody instructed them to do that.
That is what distinguishes an ecosystem from a database.
Jaya: Ultimately, we want women across generations and geographies to build relationships that produce real influence.
A senior woman in Mumbai may open an opportunity for a young founder in Delhi. Someone in her fifties may mentor someone in her twenties, who may later do the same for another woman.
That is when relationships begin multiplying opportunity.
And that, for us, is the larger purpose: not just creating successful individual women, but creating an ecosystem in which women help one another lead, influence, invest and build lasting wealth.