India’s stock market has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade, and the profile of the people involved in it is changing too.
Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath has said that the percentage of women stock market investors has gone up from 3 percent in 2014 to 30 percent in 2025. He said that roughly fifty percent of women used their accounts on their own, while the others’ accounts were run by their husbands or other relatives. But this fact notwithstanding, he indicated that Indian women were participating in the stock markets in much bigger numbers than before.
“I still remember that around 2014–15, only 2–3% of our customers were women,” Kamath posted on X. “Today, that number is about 30%. When I saw this spike, I was surprised and wanted to understand what had changed. So we ran a small survey among a couple of hundred customers,” he added.
“Roughly 50% of the women use their accounts on their own, while the other 50% have their accounts managed by someone else, such as their husbands, brothers, or children. The fact that half of the accounts are self-managed is a good start, but this needs to change significantly,” Kamath added.
Kamath also shared a chart of how the percentage of women investors in the stock market had increased since 2019. In 2019, only 11.2% of investors were women, but this number rose steadily over the next few years, and as of July 2025, 31.3% of investors are women.
The Indian stock markets have greatly expanded their scope over the last decade. In 2014, India had just 2.2 crore demat accounts, but this had increased nearly 8 times to 18.5 crore in 2024. A lot of this growth has come from smaller cities and towns — until not too long ago, stock market investors were concentrated in the big metros, but more recently, people from all over India have begun participating in the equity markets. This growth seems to have come from gender too, with more women participating in the stock markets than ever before. And while even globally, there are fewer women investors than male investors, India seems to be moving closer to achieving parity in the investing sphere for the fairer sex.