Gender parity bid: 45% of Accenture workers are women in India

The IT services giant is working in key segments in the country such as retail, telecom, energy, auto, banking, and so on

Global proffesional services and consultancy giant Accenture is closing in on its gender diversity target, with women accounting for 45 per cent of its workforce in India. Accenture’s aim is to reach equal gender representation globally.

The company also has women in 24 per cent of its senior leadership positions (managing directors) in India. Currently, it employees over 250,000 people in the country, their largest anywhere in the world. In 2017 the company had set a goal of achieving 50: 50 workforce by 2025.  

Explaining its gender goals, Piyush Singh, senior managing director, India market unit lead, says:  “We had adopted the goal of gender equality much ahead of our peers. We are not very far away from our global goal and our aim is to do so across the pyramid, from the board to the workforce level.”

Elaborating on its business strategy in India, Singh says that it is an important market and that the company has identified some key industry segments to work in. These include retail, natural resources, energy, consumer chemicals, banking, telecom, the auto sector, amongst others. 

“We are choosy about the industry we want to operate in, but we want to play a deep role in that sector. We are careful to work with only those organisations with which we have a longstanding partnership.”

GENDER PARITY BID 

• Aims to achieve gender equality across the pyramid—from the board to the work force 
• Looking at the India business key segments like retail, natural resources, chemicals, telecom, auto, banking, amongst others 
• Will go for long-term partnerships like they have with companies like Nestle, HUL, Coal India, Airtel etc
• Go deep in a segment rather than get into every industry segment  
• Indian companies will need to increase their digital transformational spends by an average of 5-7 per cent

Accenture has bagged some key contracts. For instance, in retail it is working with Nestle India, Hindustan Lever and Shoppers Stop in the e-commerce transformation space. It has also signed up with banks like Bank of Baroda and RBL, and inked a partnership with Airtel’s 5G lab. In addition, it is working with Coal India for a major digital transformation of the company.      

Singh says that in their assessment, almost all Indian companies need to increase their digital transformation capital spends by 5-7 per cent annually. Companies which are slightly behind in the space might have to increase their spends by double digits. “This has to be a permanent shift in the cost pie chart, but the inefficiencies in costs in other areas can be cleaned up so there is no increase in the total cost,” says Singh.  

He adds that digital transformation will help companies in three ways — increase productivity and efficiency, increase market share, which will generate more core revenues, and increase adjacent revenue pools. Singh says that there are certain key areas where Indian industry is looking for digital transformation.

These include customer-organisation interaction (in e-commerce the gross merchandise value is expected to go up from $55 billion to $300 billion by 2030), supply chain disruption, and people and skill transformation.

He points out, that India's supply chain and logistics cost account for 14 per cent of country's GDP compared to 8 per cent which is the global average. . So there is huge potential for reducing the inefficiency of around 6 per cent.  However, this has to be a localised solution and not one where a global blueprint is replicated, he says.