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IIMs, IITs fail to impress India Inc on gender diversity; recruiters complain of lesser women graduates by Saumya Bhattacharya & Devina Sengupta
Gender
India's top business and technology schools are struggling to keep pace with the growing gender diversity aspirations of big employers in India Inc. 

Women students at IITs have almost doubled to 11% in five years and their numbers at two B-schools - ISB-Hyderabad (29%) and IIM-Kozhikode (36%) - are inching closer to Harvard Business School (39%). Yet, recruiters complain there still aren't enough women graduates to untangle the diversity labyrinth at the workplace. 

Other IIMs are lagging though. IIM-Calcutta has only 7% women in the class of 2013 and IIM-Ahmedabad only 10.9%. 

"ICICI Bank is committed to have more women at the top. But if business schools are producing only 15-20% of women, the real problem is the lack of women in the managerial ranks," says Executive Director, HR, K Ram Kumar. "How will you have a pool of women who can be groomed into leadership roles?" 

India Inc is talking about diversity more than ever before. "Diversity breeds performance," says Yashwant Mahadik, HR head (Indian Subcontinent) at Philips India. 

A HISTORICAL ANOMALY 

"The quality of viewpoints is much better if you have gender diversity in the group," he adds. The company has given top priority to diversity in the last three years while still ensuring everyone is selected on merit. 

It has hired 84 students from IIMs and ISB in the past three years; around 27% were women. The percentage has increased from 10% earlier simply because the number of women in the institutes has gone up, according to Mahadik. 

Lack of enough women has been a historical anomaly. Rachna Aggarwal, CEO of Indus League Clothing, and alumna of IIM-Ahmedabad (batch of 1992) recalls there were less than 20 girls in her batch and only about 10% were non-engineers. "In those days too, engineers would invariably head to an MBA degree," she says. "Since the number of women in engineering was less, it resulted in a lesser number of women in management institutes." 

Aggarwal was one of the first women management trainees to be hired by Madura Coats. 

Professor V Nagadevara, who has taught for 36 years, says women at IIMs are seeing their careers grow more sharply even as their numbers have grown gradually. "They have more clarity about what they want. Women are much more selective about the profiles they choose for themselves," says the professor of Quantitative Methods and Information Systems at IIM-Bangalore. 

Progressive companies - right from MNCs such as P&G, Hindustan Unilever, Microsoft to local biggies like Infosys - have well-defined diversity targets. Such targets and constant nudging from India Inc are making B-schools gradually get the numbers right. But the other crucial talent pipeline - IITs - is still struggling. 

Gender diversity at IITs has doubled in five years, but there was only one female student for every 10 male students among the 13,196 who studied there in 2011. The percentage had peaked to 11.2% in 2010. 

IITs waived application fees for women in IIT-JEE in 2012. This led to a 10% jump in the percentage of women taking the coveted exam to more than 33%. "The fee waiver was an affirmative action to support more participation from women. Such initiatives are likely to continue," says Prof RK Shevgaonkar, director, IIT-Delhi. 

According to him, female participation has been less because many parents would not want to send their girl child away from home. Also, women prefer courses like computer science or electronics over other core engineering programs. You may find more women than men in chemistry and biology programs. 

"We would ideally want equal participation from both male and female candidates in IITs in the coming years," he adds. B Shankar, who passed out of IIT in 1971, recalls there were only four girls in his batch. He is now the executive director, HR, at BHEL, and hires regularly from the tech school. 

"Girls not only qualify for IITs nowadays, they are also making to the list of toppers. This positive change is coming slowly and hopefully, we will be able to see a decent number of girls in IITs over time." Employers in India Inc will be waiting impatiently though.