An open conversation about allyship with Tarun Chawla

What role should leaders play to embed inclusion into how teams operate every day?

What does it mean to support everyone equally? How do you create fair conditions for all?  

In this open conversation about allyship, Tarun Chawla, Senior Analytics Manager at Criteo India, explains how he uses his leadership to give the women in his team fair access, visibility, and agency to advance their careers the way they want. To him, tangible results when it comes to inclusion can only happen when impacting the full talent lifecycle, implementing inherently fair and structured processes from hiring to employee journey.  

As he says, "Inclusion isn’t about lowering the bar; It’s about removing the false assumption that just a few people are skilled enough to reach it when set up high”.  

Would you say that your vision of inclusion has evolved over time?  

Yes, it has. At the early stages of my career, I thought fairness was about treating everyone the same. As I gained experience, I realized it’s more subtle than this. Fairness also means looking at whether everyone has the same access to opportunity, visibility, and advocacy. 

What was the turning point for you? When I realized being neutral is not enough. As a leader, you can believe that you are treating everyone fairly, but if it's always the same voices that dominate meeting, the same profiles that get visibility, or the same names that are proposed for stretch roles, then you need to question your approach. Inclusion isn’t only about intent; it’s about tangible outcomes.  

My understanding shifted from “I support inclusion” to “I have to actively create the conditions for it.” How? By looking at the full lifecycle, from the way we hire to how we define relevance and merit, give feedback, we create platforms for people to showcase their work, and advocate for them when opportunities are being discussed. 

How can we create the right conditions to foster genuine and tangible inclusion? 

I do not believe inclusion is about meeting legal quotas or standards. It genuinely happens once we’ve deeply rethought how we perceive and value diversity in gender, background, skills, etc.  

Women represent close to 50–55% of my team. That did not happen because we differentiated at the time of hiring. They got hired because they were the right people for the job. I strongly believe we should always hire the most relevant person for the role, based on their capability, potential, and if they’re a good cultural and business match.  

The way forward is to structure our hiring process well enough that we won’t filter out strong talent for biases reasons. Inclusion never means lowering the bar. It’s about removing false assumptions that just a few people are skilled enough to reach it when it’s set up high.  

What's the difference between a mentor, an ally, and a sponsor? 

They’re different and yet interconnected.  

• Mentors guide you. They help you think through your development, choices, and identify your strengths and growth areas. 
• Allies stand with you. They create space, challenge assumptions, make sure your voice is heard, and intervene when the environment is not equitable. 
• Sponsors use their position of strength in your favor. They go one step further, using their influence to create opportunities for you, talking you up and giving your name when an opportunity opens up. 

Mentorship is essential of course, but it is not enough. Many people already know what they’re capable of and what they want to achieve but what they lack is visibility, access, and advocacy. More and more companies seem to be getting it, judging from how they now frame their women’s leadership programs.

For instance, Amazon India’s ElevateHER 2025 was positioned around mentorship, allyship, sponsorship, and leadership pathways, which shows that the conversation is moving beyond advice alone toward stronger career enablement.  

In your role today, how do you try to show up as an ally and advocate for women around you? 

For me, allyship must show up across the full talent lifecycle. From hiring to team atmosphere and feedback loops, I work to provide processes that are inherently fair, inclusive, and structured to ensure no one is discriminated against.  

• The first area I strive to impact is the team’s global behavior. I believe leaders have a role to play in setting the right mindset and behavior among their teams. That’s why I’m always attentive to whether women get access to high-ownership work, stakeholder-facing opportunities, and business-critical problem statements just like anyone else. When you work in analytics, visibility matters a great deal! So, it is important to give people opportunities to present their thought-process and ideas, to demonstrate their technical know-how, and to connect their work to business outcomes.
• The second is feedback. I do believe that anyone should receive clear, open, and fair feedback whatever their gender. Honest feedback is the key to a person’s evolution and development. I believe that filtering too much and avoiding potentially tough spots can limit growth. Of course, you must adapt and find the best way for a person to hear your message, but this should be based on their real capacity to welcome feedback, not on gender-related assumptions. 
• The third is sponsorship, especially around year-end cycles. During performance reviews, promotion discussions, and role mobility conversations, leaders must make sure that impact is represented clearly. If someone has gone beyond their daily workstack, taken ownership, influenced stakeholders, or delivered strong outcomes, their story needs to be visible in the room. It’s not only about encouraging someone privately. It is about advocating for them where it matters. 

Do allies lack support to grow into this essential role and ultimately become sponsors? 

Yes, many allies need more structured support and direction to become effective sponsors. While many leaders may support inclusion as a principle, they may not always know how to put allyship into practice.  

Allyship and sponsorship can sound like soft concepts but are actually very concrete. They show hiring decisions, meeting behavior, feedback quality, project allocation, performance calibration, and promotion advocacy. Companies can support leaders becoming allies, and allies become sponsors, by building allyship and sponsorship into leadership expectations instead of leaving it to personal intent. 

How can companies support them better? 

Companies can also create structured sponsorship forums, leadership development programs, diverse succession planning, returnship pathways, and manager training around feedback and bias. Several India tech organizations are already taking this direction through return-to-work programs, sponsorship initiatives, women technologist communities, and leadership accountability mechanisms.  

They can help leaders ask themselves better questions, like: 

• Who is getting visibility?
• Who is repeatedly doing support work but not strategic work?
• Who is ready for a stretch opportunity but may not be asking for it loudly?
• Are we giving clear feedback to everyon?
• Are we evaluating leadership style differently for men and women?
• Are we only mentoring talent, or are we actually sponsoring talent? 

The real shift happens when leaders move from encouragement to action. That is when an ally becomes a sponsor. 

When building a more inclusive future for tech, who should be leading this change firsthand to turn the tide? 

Change must be driven by business leaders and team managers, not just by HR and DEI teams.  

If HR and DEI teams play an essential role in creating global frameworks, corporate policies, awareness, and measurement, managers are the ones making the everyday decisions that shape careers. They’re the ones deciding who gets hired, who gets feedback, who gets trusted with high-ownership work, who gets visibility, who gets flexibility, and who gets advocated for. So, if we want to accelerate inclusion in tech, leaders must be empowered and own this topic to make it part of building high-performing teams. This becomes even more important in the GCC context. Since teams in India have moved from execution centers to increasingly solving business-critical challenges and influencing global outcomes, managers in India are now required not only to manage delivery but to build the global leaders of tomorrow. In such context, we must put a new emphasis on sponsorship, leadership accountability, and structured pathways to move women as well into strategic and decision-making roles.  

Inclusion cannot sit on the side of the business; It must be part of how we run it. 

In a diverse country like India, women often navigate different personal, cultural, and societal realities.  

How do you think companies can create more inclusive environments that account for these varied experiences? 

India is not one uniform workplace experience. Women may navigate different realities based on career stage, city, family context, caregiving responsibilities, commute, safety, mobility, marital status, maternity, or whether they are first-generation corporate professionals. 

Companies need to understand these realities without converting them into assumptions. 
For example, the need for flexibility should not equal lower ambitions, nor maternity a career slowdown by default. Same as a quieter communication style should not be mistaken for lack of confidence. Directness from a woman should not be labelled negatively when the same behavior may be accepted from a man. This is where the Indian tech ecosystem still has work to do. Policies, representation, and awareness have improved, but genuine inclusion also depends on everyday leadership behavior; how managers listen, give feedback, allocate opportunities, support people through life transitions, and evaluate potential. 
 
I believe that companies can create more inclusive environments by making flexibility fair, creating safe channels for feedback, supporting return-to-work pathways, training managers to recognize bias, and ensuring that career progression remains transparent. 
The goal is not to create exceptions for a few people but rather design an environment where different people with diverse needs can equally succeed without having to hide parts of their reality. 

You currently lead a team that includes women managers who are themselves leading and mentoring other women.  

How do you approach creating an environment where women leaders can grow, lead confidently, and bring others along with them? 

I am fortunate to lead a team where women managers are not only delivering outcomes, but also leading teams, mentoring others, and shaping the culture around them. That is something I deeply value. And yet, I am also conscious that women leaders should not be seen only as mentors or people supporters. They are business leaders. They are decision-makers. They own outcomes. They lead high-impact work, influence stakeholders, and help shape the direction of the team. 

My role is to create an environment where they can lead with confidence and in their own style. Not every leader needs to look or sound the same. Some are more analytical. Some are more direct. Some are more reflective. Some are more relationship-driven. What matters is whether they create clarity, deliver impact, develop people, and make sound decisions. I try to support women leaders by giving them autonomy, encouraging them to take visible roles, involving them in business-critical discussions, and ensuring their impact is recognized beyond the immediate team.

I also believe in giving candid feedback and coaching, because confidence grows when leaders know where they stand and what they need to work on. When women managers mentor other women, it creates a positive multiplier effect. But inclusion cannot become additional emotional labor for women alone. Male leaders, peers, managers, and organizations must all carry that responsibility. Representation becomes meaningful when it converts into ownership, influence, and leadership, and that is the environment I want to build. 

I believe that, in India’s tech and GCC ecosystem, we have a real opportunity to accelerate women’s growth — not just by bringing more women into the workforce, but by ensuring they progress, lead, influence, and sponsor others. That is what allyship in action means to me.