In The Spotlight

Women in IT – No reservations for their success!

Data Quest Article, 04/2010, Ganesh Natarajan

It’s been a financial year when the significant investments made by Zensar in the “Women for Excellence” initiative have really paid off. From the unprecedented management success of women leaders in marketing, sales, finance, delivery, quality and human resources to the recruitment of young MBAs on campus where two young women from ISB stood out among the new inductees, its been a year when our diversity and inclusion policies and the ability to support women all the way from entry to the highest rungs of the corporate ladder have really borne fruit. And what’s true for Zensar has been true for NASSCOM and CII as well. The CII National Council is embellished by power women like Naina Lal Kidwai of HSBC, Chanda Kochar of ICICI, Meher Pudumjee of Thermax and Bhairavi Jani President of YI, while three new entrants to the NASSCOM Executive Council – Neelam Dhawan of HP, Sandhya Vasudevan of Reuters and Sangeeta Reddy have joined NASSCOM VP par excellence Sangeeta Gupta as leaders of our own industry. So can we all look at the Women’s Reservation Bill and say “Thanks but no thanks” because it would appear that the merits of women are well recognized in industry, particularly the IT sector.

A word of caution here – it may be too early to blow the victory bugles because we should not forget that even these successes are only a recent phenomenon. Studying engineering in the seventies and management in the eighties, we were always bemused at the abysmal gender ratios – four women in a college population of over a thousand characterised the Birla Institute of  Technology and an abysmal percentage of zero was the score at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering where the only women were a couple of researchers and two more on the faculty. Those were the days when the percentage of women competing for entry level jobs in Indian industry rarely exceeded low single digits in any industry or firm.

The good news is that the last three decades have seen an enormous change in the number of women pursuing professional education and hence the percentage of women entering the job market has climbed to the thirties and even forties in the services industry. This augurs well for a complete balancing of genders at all levels of corporate hierarchies in the next decade or so, though there are many factors that industry CEOs particularly in the IT and Finance industries are familiar with, that may still come in the way of this very desirable outcome.

The transformation in engineering college intake has been nothing short of dramatic. Even in the mid eighties only five to eight percent of entrants were women but, inspired by the dramatic growth of the IT industry and its propensity to hire mainly engineers, over forty percent of entrants were women by the middle of the first decade of this century. With the emphasis shifting to hiring from other areas of science and commerce, the balance can be expected to be even better in this decade. Moreover, the IT industry has acquired a reputation for good diversity and inclusion policies, offering a safe and friendly working environment and barring a few incidents, a very progressive management ethos which enable young women to build successful careers and sustain double income families.
 
However mid career dropouts continue to happen as women endure the social expectations of marriage and motherhood and occasionally drop out in mid career to focus on family issues. Many organizations have found innovative solutions to smooth over some complex phases in every woman’s career and enable the transition to top management but this will need to be an area of focus for all of us running firms in this sector and worthy organizations like Poonam Barua’s Women in Leadership and the Diversity Forum in NASSCOM, which have done yeoman work in this area in recent times.

In the larger context, one swallow does not make a summer and the signs of success in our industry should not lead us to assume that all is well in the gender balancing efforts of the country. The bias against women is evident in many selection processes and if the Reservation Bill finds its way to becoming law, we should celebrate and welcome it as a way to ensure that the unarguable benefits of having adequate women in all decision making bodies will be visible to the country in all walks of like. A decade or so of reservation holds the potential to make our society truly balanced and set the country on its path to global leadership.