Gender-diversity drive at the country’s premier business schools has lost a little steam this year, as top Indian Institutes of Management have missed their short-term target on female students.
Women constitute 26% of the class of 2018-20 at IIMs Ahmedabad, Kozhikode and Calcutta, compared with 30% in the previous batch. At IIM-Bangalore, their share has remained unchanged at about 28% for three years now. The only outlier among top IIMs is Indore, where women comprise 39% of the new batch, but that too is down from last year’s 41%.
A reason for this skewed ratio is the composition of engineering students, who form a majority of those taking the common admission test (CAT) and clearing it, said experts. Engineering colleges are worse off when it comes to gender diversity and that percolates into IIMs and further. “From classroom to boardroom, the ratio of women plummets. Institutes outside India have much better gender ratio,” said SV Nathan, chief talent officer at Deloitte India. “As a recruiter, we would like to have more women across IITs and IIMs.”
Most IIMs have set themselves a short-term target of inducing at least 30% women. “Once we achieve the 30%-woman ratio consistently for a few years, we would be revising the target upwards,” said Sumanta Basu, chairperson of admissions at IIM-Calcutta.
In 2013, IIM-Kozhikode made history, with women filling up half the seats, in part due to it giving higher weight for female candidates during the selection process. But the institute couldn’t sustain it, with the share shrinking to 30% in the 2017-19 batch and 26% this time. The situation may change for the good in coming years, thanks to government efforts.
IIMs are directly impacted by the intake of women at engineering colleges, primarily Indian Institutes of Technology. The Ministry of Human Resource Development earlier this year directed all 23 IITs to ensure that at least 14% of their seats went to female candidates in the 2018 batch. Most IITs have been able to meet that target this year. This may help increase the number of women taking the entrance test and getting admission. This year, only 34.3% of those who took CAT were women, said Rishikesha T Krishnan, director, IIM-Indore.
Companies are willing to induct more women, as they too try to fix their diversity ratio and want the institutes to produce quality female management graduates.
“Our intake of woman management graduates is higher than the percentage of women at the IIMs. The change has to begin with the academic institutes to increase the intake of women without diluting the standards,” said Rajeshwar Tripathi, chief people officer at automaker Mahindra & Mahindra.
IIM-Ahmedabad is in the process of introducing possible changes in admission criteria to achieve better diversity, not just on the basis of gender, but also on academic backgrounds.
“In leading international B-schools, especially in North America and Europe, there is a high degree of gender diversity (female students account for more than 40%) and also academic background diversity with students from various disciplines in a typical MBA class,” said Bakul Dholakia, former director, IIM-Ahmedabad.
The academic diversity is down at IIM-Kozhikode as non-engineering students are just 9% this year compared with 13% last year. “Gender and academic diversity figures are slightly lower than last year.
Late-stage withdrawals and introduction of gender and academic diversity scores by other IIMs and Bschools (when seen against a nearly constant CAT test-taker composition) are main causes,” said Shahid Abdulla, PGP admissions chair at Kozhikode.
IIM-Calcutta has done better this year in terms of academic diversity with 12.53% students from nonengineering background. Last year, it was 8.6%.
“We have been able to achieve gender diversity to a great extent in comparison to previous years when the female ratio of students used to hover around 10%,” said Basu of IIMCalcutta.
“In comparison to the last batch, there has also been a slight improvement in academic diversity in the current batch as a result of a change in admission policy over the years to meet our objectives.”
