SheSparks 2026 spotlights women across professions, life stages, and geographies—through culture, conversations, showcases, and direct access to opportunity.
It is a festival where culture is the format, and enablement is the outcome, where India meets its changemakers on stage, on the ground.
40.3% of Indian women are employed.
14–20% of entrepreneurs in India are women.
Women are under-represented in advanced and emerging skills pathways.
Women comprise only about 14.9% of the tech workforce.
Lack of direct access to mentorship, professional networks, and structured opportunity pipelines.
With the Future Shapers: She Leads Change Awards 2026, YourStory, together with HerStory, aims to honour exceptional women who are driving inclusive growth, fostering innovation, breaking barriers, and creating a more equal world for all.
Dr Danasari Anasuya Seethakka has had an incredible journey from forest camps to the cabinet table—a story of justice, safety and dignity. Hear how she is redefining women’s leadership in panchayats, welfare, and rural development, and how policy really reaches the last village.
Explore how India’s travel story is being reimagined from a woman’s point of view—how do women move, work and feel in public space. Understand how safety, infrastructure, and local markets can turn tourism into real freedom and livelihoods for women.
Meet women drivers and instructors from Azad Foundation’s Women with Wheels programme who have gone from domestic work and unsafe commutes to professional driving, training and steady earnings. Explore how mobility became their route to safety, confidence, and financial independence in cities that rarely imagined them at the wheel.
Dr Ranjana Kumari unpacks the economic and emotional cost of unpaid work that Indian women shoulder—from care and housework to community organising. Explore why policy, data, and markets still ignore this labour, and what it would take to finally recognise and reward it.
As workplaces evolve with new technologies, leadership is also being redefined. Explore how women can move beyond representation to real influence, building credibility, shaping decisions, and stepping confidently into leadership roles in an AI-driven world.
A conversation around Shivani Sharma’s poetry collection Aparajita, which reflects the quiet strength, resilience, and inner journeys of women.
Women-led startups still get only a tiny sliver of venture funding. What are the real blockers — pipeline, bias, cheque size, risk committees, or the way “ambition” is defined — and how can we overcome them?
Her journey may have begun from a small town in India but Swati Bhargava has had a global career, taking big risks, and making bigger comebacks. Here are her honest lessons on why you should bet on yourself to build a life that feels like your own.
GCCs today are emerging as critical hubs for AI research, product development and governance, and women are playing a key role in shaping how these technologies are built and deployed. This session dives deep into how women are driving AI innovation, spearheading AI-led initiatives that impact global business strategy, implementing ethical AI practices (from bias mitigation to transparent AI models), and balancing the speed of implementation with governance, trust and long-term enterprise impact.
Captain Zoya Agarwal has turned “firsts” into a habit, from commanding record-breaking long-haul routes to leading all-women crews. Learn more about courage, decision-making under pressure, and how each woman’s breakthrough can widen the runway for hundreds to follow.
Bandana Preyashi (IAS), who leads Bihar’s social welfare and women’s development agenda, deep dives into how policy around pensions, hostels, health, and jobs change when women are centred, not sidelined.
How do women build and scale businesses in high-risk, high-trust categories in India? Explore capital, credibility, bias, and the second-order impact on drivers, patients, and passengers who rely on them every day.
Artificial intelligence is redefining how we work, lead, and innovate. Neha Bagaria of HerKey examines why women must play a central role in the AI revolution — as candidates, consumers, and creators — and how doing so can shape the next decade of opportunity for women.
Through Naturals Salon & Spa, C. K. Kumaravel has helped co-found one of India’s largest networks of women entrepreneurs with his wife K. Veena. In this conversation, he reflects on the mindset shifts, social barriers, and leadership lessons that have shaped Naturals’ women-led franchise model. The discussion explores how financial independence is transforming not just businesses, but families and communities across India.
Indian women’s bodies go through a lot from puberty to pregnancy, surgery, and menopause. Hear a leading gynaecologist break down how stigma, delayed care, and unpaid work collide in her OPD, and what it will take to put women’s health at the centre, not the margins.
What does it mean to grow up with a larger than life legacy but choosing the ordinary? Learn how Soha Ali Khan tackles everyday life of motherhood, marriage, money, ageing in the public eye, and why women need to write their own scripts for life.
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