Despite some changes in recent years, Indian family businesses remain resolutely male dominated. Women are simply not taken into the company. The multi-billion dollar Murugappa group from Chennai, for 122 years, “has not taken any woman from the family into the company,” says Dr Valli Arunachalam, whose father M.V. Murugappa was the head of the conglomerate for over two decades.Men are automatically taken into board positions, women are kept out, says Arunachalam, who is a nuclear scientist and an expert on semi-conductors. She has challenged this in the National Company Law Tribunal and tells Sidharth Bhatia in this podcast that she will go to “the Supreme Court if necessary.”She, along with her sister, owns over 8% of the company and had offered to sell the stake to the group at a fair price, but even that was turned down. “They also en masse rejected taking me on the board, even though I was better qualified than many of the men,” she says.Her fight, she says, is not for herself, but “for gender justice.”