Slow Increase In Women Numbers In Top Indian IT Firms

Women in India's top five IT firms account for 35.4% of the total employee count, as shown by HR firm Xpheno's research. This has increased just 0.6 percentage points from March 2020, when it was 34,8%.

Xpheno looked at the numbers in Infosys, TCS, HCL, Wipro, and LTIMindtree, and these firms had a total of 539,646 women at the end of March 2023. The numbers have increased by more than 1.5 lakh since March 2020. Meanwhile, the total headcount in these firms rose by 5 lakh employees, from 10 lakh to around 15 lakh.

According to Xpheno co-founder Kamal Karanth, one of the factors causing the stagnation in numbers is that fewer women are enrolling in courses relevant to IT. The proportion of women in computer science and IT engineering courses increased from 42% of pass-outs in 2012 to 52% in 2018. More women engineers passed out than men in these two streams in 2017 and 2018. But this proportion has dropped since 2018 and hit a low of 40% in 2021 and 2022. So, fewer women were available to be recruited from campuses, Karanth said.

Need For Career Development Programmes

Companies have not progressed much in increasing women's workforce participation since policies focus primarily on sensitisation and committee formation instead of career development programmes, as per management consulting firm Aon. Firms are not focusing on tracking the process of development, which is why gender diversity programmes are not impactful, said Ishita Bandyopadhyay, MD, Aon's Assessment Solutions, India and Southeast Asia.

As reported by The Times of India, she added that it is not enough to measure the number of women who were part of leadership programmes. They needed to include metrics to track how many of them completed the programme, and what happened to their career progression within a year and after three years of the programme.

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