Top engineering colleges of India are trying to improve their gender diversity ratio by increasing the admission of girl students, with a target of 30-50 per cent women in every batch in the coming years, sources told The Economic Times.
At present, at least two in 10 students in the first year of undergraduate batches in IITs of Delhi, Hyderabad, Madras, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Roorkee and NIT Jalandhar are women, the report said. This is a steep rise from 8 per cent across IITs in 2017.
“An ideal situation is where gender balance is restored without any interventions. For now, there are interventions needed to change the mindset and perspective of society towards women pursuing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to enable better representations in classrooms,” Rangan Banerjee, director of IIT Delhi, told ET.
This comes on the heels of corporate India’s efforts to recruit more women in entry-level jobs in the science and technology sector to improve women’s representation.
Companies like Goldman Sachs and ecommerce firms boast of targeted initiatives to attract women for STEM jobs from these premier engineering institutes. Amazon, for example, launched Amazon WoW, a platform for women engineers in India to connect with recruiters and Amazon leaders.
“The more opportunities you enable at the grassroots level (such as hiring more women at the early stages of their career) directly leads to building a pipeline of future women leaders,” Flipkart Chief People Officer Krishna Raghavan is quoted as saying in the report.
Check out DH's latest videos
(Published 29 March 2022, 09:27 IST)
JOIN US