BHUBANESWAR: Within the tech world, the tide seems to have turned in favour of women with an increasing number of initiatives focused on closing the gender gap. But, the battle of gender equality is only half won, limiting itself to junior or entry-level positions.
From less than 20 per cent of the workforce constituting women around 2008, most companies today report about half the entry-level recruits being women. The number of women in senior roles, however, are few and far between.
The second largest IT services firm Infosys said about 48-51 per cent of entry-level recruits are women, boosting the ratio for women employees’ participation in the total workforce at 36 per cent. At leadership levels, close to 15 per cent of the workforce constitute women across the Infosys Group.
“Several initiatives to create an inclusive, safe and harassment-free workplace have helped in increasing the number of women in the workforce. However, it will take a few more years before we have the critical mass that we need to build that healthy pipeline to foster a 50:50 ratio,” said Aruna C Newton, Associate Vice President and Head, Global Diversity and Inclusion, Sustainability Reporting and Governance.
Capgemini and Mindtree, too, admit to having witnessed an increase in the number of women recruits. “Despite all focused programmes to address leadership pipeline, the existing socio-cultural set-up in India poses a big challenge to women at workplace post marriage,” said Gayathri Ramamurthy, head, diversity & inclusion, Capgemini India. Capgemini India has 15% women in senior roles.
At Mindtree, amongst the senior leadership, six per cent are women. However, at its Bhubaneswar Learning Centre, where fresh recruits are trained, 49 per cent are women, up from around 18 per cent in 2005. “We have started hiring from women-only engineering colleges and have career comeback programmes as well. We also work with a few partners to enable women to apply for specific job roles as part of these comeback programmes,” said Chitra Byregowda, Head, Sustainability & Diversity.
Others such as Accenture has set a target of achieving a gender-balanced workforce by 2025 and to increase the diversity of leadership by growing the percentage of women managing directors to at least 25 per cent by 2020. Currently, 45 per cent of new hires, 32 per cent of promotions to managing director level and 21 per cent of MDs of the 1,70,000-strong team are women.
INFOSYS: 36% participation of women employees in the total workforce
ACCENTURE: 1,70,000 women at Accenture, more than 40% of its global workforce
CAPGEMINI: About 36% women in support functions, over 32% women in technology roles