Women Rising

Women Rising

IT's Most Powerful Women was our tribute last year (DQ, June 30, 2005) to women in the technology industry who had managed to climb the ladder and rise to the top. Whether it's Neelam Dhawan of Microsoft or Rekha Menon of Accenture, Jessie Paul of Wipro, Revathy Kasturi of Novell India (she's recently moved back to a professional role after founding Tarang) or Padma Ravichander of Perot Systems, women have most definitely made their mark in the IT industry. In 2003, in one of the most-reprinted Dataquest articles ever, columnist Deepa Kandaswamy had written about “talibanism in technology”: why women have remained invisible in technology through the ages. “I have found seven reasons,” she wrote, “social myths, conditioning, media, networking, deterrence, balance and marketing.” So how relevant is a statement like this today? Says Indrani Ghose, VP, IT, Oberoi Group, “After 17 years in the industry, I think that the glass ceiling for women in technology still exists to a large extent and it will be a while before people are ready to shed their stero-type images of suitable jobs for women.” Breaking the Glass Ceiling However, many would argue today that this is only one half of the story. Although the proportion of women remains low as compared to men, the number in hardcore technology segment and not just the IT industry is slowly rising. Take for example Padmashree Warrior of Motorola or Jaysree Ullal of Cisco. Warrior has been recently featured in Fortune as a strong contender for a berth in the listing of the top 50 most powerful women in global business. Back home we have Radha Shelat who has not just been the CTO at Veritas Software (now Symantec, after the acquisition) but has almost single-handedly spearheaded Veritas' India operations till she quit the company this year to join a Silicon Valley startup in Pune. While the numbers might be low, they would be significantly higher especially if one compares with the scenario even a couple of years back. The recently conducted Dataquest-IDC Best Employers Survey revealed some interesting figures. Around 24% of the workforce in the 32 companies that made it to the second round of the survey were women, which is not a small proportion. According to industry estimates, IT companies in India employ anything between 10-25% women while ITeS averages at around 35-70%. The average of both IT and ITeS combined would be around 40%. Traditionally, the IT industry has been slow as compared to ITeS when it comes to employing women. Given the huge manpower demand in the BPO industry, ITeS has been quite proactive when it comes to hiring women. Says Amit Agarwal, hiring leader, Genpact, “Historically, we have less of a baggage when it comes to hiring women.” According to industry estimates, IT companies in India employ 20-25% women, while BPO employs over 50%. The average across IT and BPO, combined, would be roughly 35% “Personally, I can only recall one instance of gender discrimination in my working career to date, when several years ago two male colleagues left the organization I was working with, rather than report in to a woman boss-me!” says Neelam Dhawan. However the situation is a lot different today. Today more and more companies in the IT industry are more consciously practicing gender diversity. Says Ritu Madbhavi, head of IT at FCB Ulka, “I have never encountered gender bias at the workplace.” Multinational IT companies are actually spearheading the practice (of apponting women) primarily because they have already reaped the benefits of the practice. Says C Mahalingam, senior VP, HR, Symphony Services, “India is slowly opening its eyes to the business benefits of diversity.” To Attract and Retain Today the IT industry is not just doing a lot to attract talent but even to retain it. Attracting talent is not necessarily confined to attracting the fairer sex but even talent with physical disability so as to ensure that the workforce within the company reflects the demographic profile of the market. While facilities are being provided in the form of day-care centers, flexi-timings, work-from-home options, extended maternity leaves there are conscious efforts to increase the intake of women during recruitment as well as create leadership development programs to make sure that quality female talent gets an equal opportunity to climb up the corporate ladder. IBM, for example, has identified four women-only engineering institutes and ensures that a sizeable proportion of their recruitment happens from these institutes. Finally, as the proportion of women in the IT industry is on the rise, the number of technologists still remains considerably low. Only one (Radha Shelat) of the 10 most profiled last year was a hard core technologist. The percentage of women in the information technology work force declined from a high of 41% in 1996 to 32.4% in 2004, according to a report by the Information Technology Association of America trade group in 2005. The shrinking representation of women is largely due to the fact that one out of every three women in the IT work force falls into administrative job categories that have experienced significant overall declines in recent years. While this is likely to be true in case of IT Inc in India, we see more women today in the specialized technology domain-which is most definitely very heartening.