Corporate India fancies girl engineers

Nineteen-year-old Tripteesh Kaur, a third year student of engineering is still quibbling over the gift she plans to buy for her home-maker mother after she gets her first cheque of Rs 70,000 as stipend from Microsoft next summer.

However, she is quite sure that she will land the job in the same company in 2014 when she graduates from Indraprastha (IP) University. “I always dreamt about working for Microsoft, now I will live that dream,” says Kaur.

With job market bouncing back with elan, campus placements in Delhi’s professional colleges are getting their mojo back. What, however, surprises the placement officers is the relentlessly increasing demand for women engineers.

No wonder then that the only girls’ engineering college in Delhi – Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology (IGIT) – has already placed close to half of its 180-batch students more than six months before the academic session is slated to end next July.

Not only this, some students, albeit a handful, who will graduate in 2014 have already pocketed jobs at fat pay packages in MNCs. Four girls studying in the third year (pre-final year) have already been placed in Cisco Systems while the campus placements are organised to place only the final year students.

Similarly, six third-year girls, including Tripteesh, have been placed in Microsoft (global) at an annual package of around Rs 16 lakhs. “Initially, the students will be made to work as interns next summer before they are taken on board a year later,” said Dr Nupur Prakash, principal of IGIT, a college affiliated to IP University.

Besides CISCO and Microsoft, there are other companies such as Qualcom which visited the campus some time back and offered fat pay packages to third year students. “Qualcom recently hired three students from 2014-15 batch at an annual package of Rs 12 lakhs (plus joining bonus of Rs 3 lakhs),” informs Dr A K Mohapatra, training and placement coordinator at IGIT.

The scenario is quite positive even in other departments such as mechanical and automation – which are conventionally not taken up by the female students where out of a batch of 60 girls, 32 have already found jobs in big companies such as GE Research, Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra & Mahindra, Flur Daniel, ABB, Cummins India and Oracle India.  

Shedding light on the growing enthusiasm for fairer sex in India Inc, Dr Prakash says that the companies are hiring them in droves that too much in advance only with an intent to correct their gender ratio.

Govind Walkhu, an HR expert and founder of Common Job Test, an HR solution company, also echoes the same sentiment: “Women are hired because they help contain the high attrition which is prevalent in IT and automation sector. The phenomenon (of hiring women engineers) is evident in only those companies which offer time flexibility of managing work and home simultaneously. As a result, women tend to stay put in these organisations for a long period which works to the advantage of these companies.” 

Even co-ed colleges acknowledge the trend of growing strength of female engineers. “There is a definite improvement in the percentage of women workers. This improvement is the result of flexible timings and wor from home options offered by companies,” said Dr Ruchika Malhotra, assistant professor at Delhi Technological
University.