B Schools transforming workforce landscape?
Low gender diversity ratio used to be a perpetual pain-area for leading business schools in the country until recent years. Not, anymore.
Top management institutes across the country have reported a higher number of girl students in the campus compared to past years. While a gradual rise in the trend for the past few years could be seen, this year the batch of 2019-21, broke all records by making it an all-time high.
IIM Sambalpur reported to have 51% girls students followed by LIBA Chennai at 50.5 and MICA at 50%; FORE School of Management – 48.5%; BIMTECH Greater Noida – 45%; IIM Indore – 42%; IIM Trichy – 40%; IFMR Graduate School of Business, Sricity – 39%; TAPMI 38%; IIM Bangalore & IRMA – 37%; IIM Lucknow – 36.5%; IIM Calcutta – 32%, IIM Kozhikode -30%; IIM Ahmedabad – 24%.
B Schools paving a path for transformation of the workforce landscape?
To a great extent, yes. Indian management institutes left no stones unturned to respond to market demands for diversity by working on the prevalent skewed gender ratio and successfully managed to improve it.
The phenomenal growth in female aspirants of CAT (and other MBA entrance exams too) has been the other contributor. Refer chart.
Industry should be more than happy to embrace this trend as the challenge to induct more female professionals in order to balance the gender equality ratio, has been plaguing the Indian recruiters as much as their global counter parts.
How adequate is the Pipeline?
About 28% of the overall workforce of India constitutes female staff but as one goes up the ladder of corporate India (female population 48.5%), the number turns out to be abysmally low and remain stagnant. According to Prime Database, 67 of 1814 CXOs in NSE-listed companies are women as of Mar 2019. Which is 3.69% and the same was 3.2% as of Mar 2014.
This challenge is faced across the globe and according to WEF Global Gender Gap Report, India stands 108th out 144 participating countries.
Globally, in S&P 500 Companies, it is 44.7% at the entry level and 5% as it comes to the top of the pyramid. According to a study by Women in the Workplace 2018, conducted by McKinsey in partnership with LeanIn.Org, the gender diversity figures have not improved much.
According to the Fortune 1000 list of companies, 22% women were found in the board in 2018.
Despite the genuine intent of the campus recruiters to attract higher number of talents from the fairer sex, ample numbers of candidates were not always available in during placement sessions, which hopefully will not be the case in days to come as hiring managers will have a sizable number of girl candidates in campus to select from.
