← Back to the founder directory

Saundarya Rajesh

From a career break of her own to founding Avtar, the Chennai firm that put “second careers for women” on India Inc.'s agenda.

Born
1968, Bangalore, India
Known for
Founding Avtar Group; second careers for women
Industry
Workplace culture, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)
Education
English literature, University of Madras; MBA, Pondicherry School of Management; PhD on women's workforce participation

Early career

Saundarya Rajesh began her career at Citibank in 1990, where she helped set up the merchant services division for its credit card business. She then took a break after becoming a mother, an experience that later shaped her work. Between 1992 and 1995 she worked as a producer and compere for All India Radio and Doordarshan, and from 1996 to 2003 she was a part-time lecturer at MOP Vaishnav College for Women in Chennai.

Founding Avtar

On 3 December 2000 she set up a talent strategy and recruitment firm, Avtar, with a founding team that included Umasanker Kandaswamy and Priya Dayabaran. The early years were about recruitment: screening thousands of candidates for a bank, filling hundreds of openings at a container terminal despite the dot-com bust, and hiring from smaller cities such as Vellore, Trichy and Coimbatore.

Second careers for women

The turning point came in 2005. Avtar's first research report, Viewport, found that about 18% of attrition in India came from women who stepped off the career track and never returned. Avtar began working on what Saundarya calls “second-career women”, a term she coined, and launched Avtar I-WIN, a national registry of women seeking part-time and flexible assignments. In 2006 Avtar enabled what it describes as India's first recorded second-career programme, for Standard Chartered Bank, and in 2007 it helped the Future Group hire over 1,800 women returnees into flexible work.

Building an ecosystem

From there, Avtar grew into a group. In 2008 she set up Avtar Human Capital Trust, a non-profit arm for empowering women and girls. In 2011 she launched Flexi Careers India and partnered with The Hindu on a career fair for women professionals that Avtar says drew over 25,000 attendees. She went on to launch Project Puthri (2016, career pathing for school girls), the Best Companies for Women in India study with Working Mother Media (2016), the MITR programme for adolescent boys (2019) and myAvtar.com (2020), which Avtar calls India's first job portal for under-represented groups. She also completed a PhD on flexible working and women's workforce participation, received in 2014.

Author and speaker

Her first book, The 99 Day Diversity Challenge: Creating an Inclusive Workplace (2018), won the Book of the Year Award 2021 from the Indian Society for Training and Development. Her second, Conversations with the Career Doctor: Women Thriving and Winning at Work, was published by Penguin Random House in April 2024. She has spoken at TEDx, the Future of Women conference in Colombo, the World AI Show in Dubai and the Top Women Conference in South Africa.

Impact and mission

Seramount, Avtar's partner, says Avtar has provided career-pathing training to more than 200,000 women and that around 100,000 women have found jobs through myAvtar, while Avtar says it has worked with over 1,000 organisations. As Avtar marked its 25th year in 2025, its stated mission is to transform 100,000 workplaces across India by 2027, support employment for 500,000 women and reach 50,000 educational institutions. These figures are the organisations' own claims.

Timeline

Recognition

The takeaway: name the problem, measure it, then build the market around it. A single research finding, that 18% of attrition was women who never came back, became the foundation of a whole category, and a career break she lived through became a business.

Back to the directory

Sources

Written from public information, including Wikipedia, Avtar's founder page, Avtar's About page and Seramount. Where the sources gave different years for awards (for example the Chevening Changemaker and WebWonderWomen awards), the later-dated Wikipedia and Avtar timeline entries were used. Impact figures are the organisations' own claims.