DEI Often Stops Where the Contract Starts
American companies have spent years talking about inclusion. They’ve rewritten handbooks, updated recruiting language, rolled out leadership trainings, hired consultants, and created employee resource groups to show they value diverse perspectives.
For women in leadership, those changes are all moving us in the right direction. They give us the ability to lead without having every move we make questioned by a less qualified male simply because he was born with a certain body part.
Unfortunately, policies are only as good as their followthrough, and companies have overlooked an increasingly common blindspot. With the expansion of technology and remote work, more and more companies are sending work offshore. And while our DEI policies have promised female leaders autonomy against patriarchal work environments, we’re still exposing them to outside teams who don’t respect female authority. If a company is allowed to say it values equality while hiring vendors, contractors, and offshore partners who speak only to the nearest man in the room (or on the virtual call), do our DEI policies require an asterisk?
The Vendor Relationship Is Still a Workplace
This is especially relevant in development, technology, design, and marketing environments, where American companies often rely on offshore teams to handle specialized or high-volume work. The issue is not that offshore work is inherently bad, or that any one country should be treated as a monolith. India, for example, has brilliant developers, modern firms, strong women leaders, and professionals who operate with complete respect for female authority.
But it’s also true that patriarchal norms remain deeply embedded in many parts of Indian society, and American companies need to be honest about how those norms can show up in cross-cultural work.
Pew Research found that 87% of Indian adults completely or mostly agree that “a wife must always obey her husband,” and 80% agree that when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women. Those are not fringe opinions. They point to a broader belief system in which male authority and male economic priority are still widely normalized.
India also ranked 131st out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Index, and McKinsey’s 2025 research found that women hold only 17% of C-suite roles and 20% of board roles in Indian corporations.
Those statistics don’t mean every Indian vendor will dismiss a woman in leadership. They do mean American companies should stop acting surprised when some offshore teams struggle to recognize a woman as the technical, creative, or strategic authority in the room.
For Example…
I’ve asked offshore development teams for revisions and had the request explained back to me as impossible because “this is just not how the system works,” only to then explain back to them (much to their surprise) how the system can, in fact, support the revision and, in many cases, simply to prove my point, I write the code myself.
I’ve then watched a male counterpart suggest an edit and have it accepted without any debate whatsoever, while every ounce of my direction gets challenged, reinterpreted, delayed, or treated like a suggestion waiting for approval. I’ve been told a call couldn’t happen unless my male counterpart was available, even when he had no required input on the work and said nothing for the entire meeting.
I’ve had designs changed without approval and then had the vendor explain why their version was the better choice.
And yes, I understand the difference between collaboration and being difficult. I work in development and design. Pushback is part of the job. Sometimes the answer really is no. Sometimes a request creates a technical problem, a budget problem, a timeline problem, or a maintenance problem. I don’t want a team that blindly agrees with every direction I give just because I said it.
But there’s a difference between thoughtful pushback and the kind of pushback that only seems to appear when a woman gives the direction. When I give input and get a lecture about why I don’t understand the system, especially when I then have to explain the technical path forward, that’s not collaboration. That’s a waste of everyone’s time -most importatly, the company’s.
The Cost Savings Start to Look Different
Companies usually outsource work for one main reason: cost.
Sure, we can dress it up with language about scalability, global talent, production capacity, and flexible support. All of that can be true. But most of the time, the decision starts with the same basic math: this team costs less than hiring the same labor internally.
Fine. Businesses have budgets. I live in the real world.
But how much money is a company actually saving if its internal female leaders have to spend hours re-explaining approved decisions, correcting work that ignored direction, joining unnecessary follow-up calls, or waiting for a male colleague to validate what a female director already said?
How cheap is the cheaper hourly rate when the company is paying its own people to manage around the vendor?
That’s the part that doesn’t always show up on the invoice. The vendor’s hours may look efficient on paper, but the internal cost can be much higher than anyone wants to calculate. A female leader loses time explaining the same thing twice. A project slows down because direction was treated as optional. A design has to be corrected because someone changed it without approval. A male colleague gets pulled into a call for no reason other than the vendor seems more comfortable when a man is present.
And eventually, the cost moves beyond the project. A woman who has worked hard to earn her role may start asking why she’s spending so much of her day fighting to be treated like she belongs in it. She may start looking for a company where her authority is protected instead of treated as something she has to keep re-proving. At that point, the company is not just risking project efficiency. It’s risking the loss of experienced leadership, institutional knowledge, and the kind of talent it claims it wants to retain.
Vendor Behavior Is Part of Workplace Culture
This is where DEI has to move beyond the employee handbook.
If a company wouldn’t tolerate an internal employee repeatedly bypassing a female director, it shouldn’t tolerate a vendor doing it. If an employee refused to join a call unless a man was present, that would be addressed. If an employee ignored a woman’s technical direction until a male colleague repeated it, no one would need a three-part committee discussion to understand the issue.
But when the same behavior comes from an offshore team, companies often soften it into “communication differences” or “cultural nuance.” Sometimes cultural nuance is real. Cross-cultural work does require patience. Not every awkward interaction is discrimination. Not every misunderstanding is bias. And not every frustrating vendor is operating from some deeply patriarchal belief system. Sometimes people are just bad at communication. But when the pattern is consistent, companies need to stop hiding behind politeness.
If a vendor regularly looks past the woman leading the work, waits for a man to confirm her direction, refuses to meet unless a male counterpart is available, changes her approved work, or explains her own area of expertise back to her, that’s not a harmless cultural difference. That’s a vendor management problem. And if that vendor is part of the daily work environment, then it’s also a workplace culture problem.
Companies Need to Ask Better Questions
Vendor evaluation usually focuses on cost, technical skill, availability, turnaround time, communication tools, and whether the team can join meetings at whatever hour makes everyone equally miserable. While these are important qualifiers, they’re not enough.
Companies also need to ask whether the vendor can respect the company’s leadership structure. Not in theory. In practice.
Will the team take direction from a female lead without requiring male confirmation? Will they address the person assigned as the decision-maker, even when a man is also on the call? Will they challenge work based on technical reasoning instead of assumptions about who understands the system? Do they have women in client-facing, technical, or leadership roles? What happens if someone on their team repeatedly bypasses the assigned lead?
Companies should make expectations explicit during onboarding. The assigned lead is the decision-maker. Direction does not need to be validated by a male colleague unless the actual project structure requires it. Approved designs should not be changed without approval. Technical pushback should be specific, documented, and tied to the work. If the vendor has a concern, they can raise it professionally with the person leading the project.
None of this is complicated. It only feels complicated when companies are more comfortable writing values statements than enforcing them.
Women Shouldn’t Have to Carry this
One of the most exhausting parts of this dynamic is that women are often expected to handle it themselves.
We’re supposed to correct the behavior without sounding defensive. Document the pattern without sounding dramatic. Reassert authority without sounding difficult. Keep the project moving without letting anyone see exactly how much extra time is being wasted behind the scenes.
That’s not inclusion. That’s asking women to absorb the gap between what a company says it values and what it actually enforces.
Companies need to back the women they promote. That means documenting repeated vendor behavior. It means letting female leaders escalate the issue without having to build a courtroom case first. It means male colleagues need to redirect authority in the moment instead of accidentally accepting power that doesn’t belong to them.
Equality Has to Travel With the Work
Global partnerships can be valuable. Offshore development can be smart, efficient, and collaborative. But if a company is going to build global teams, its standards have to travel with the work.
That includes the standard that women in leadership are not decorative. They are not placeholders. They are not there to relay decisions from a man who must surely be somewhere nearby.
They are the authority because the company made them the authority.
If American companies want credit for promoting women, they also need to protect those women when leadership gets uncomfortable, inconvenient, or culturally unfamiliar to the teams hired to support them.
Otherwise, the DEI policy is nothing more than fluff.
