For most companies, hiring women employees at an entry level has never been a problem. However very few of them make it to the higher levels. This has been a concern for recruiters.
To correct this, companies have become aggressive on taking up HR schemes to increase the number of women in the top echelons of management.
At Bangalore-based Wipro Ltd, women make up close to 25 per cent of the workforce. However, there are only 5-8 per cent of them in the higher echelons of the company. Girish Paranjpe, joint CEO-IT business of the company, said that while the number of male and female employees are almost equal at the entry-level across the country, the numbers begin to dwindle towards the top.
“We have put in place various HR policies to ensure that the number of women in the higher levels rise. We offer extended maternity leave as well as the option of working from home. Our objective is to provide early exposure to women, allow them flexibility in work and give them mentoring,” said Paranjpe on the sidelines of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Women Business Leaders Forum (WBLF) in Bangalore.
Similar is the case at PriceWaterhouseCoopers where 30 per cent of the workforce comprises of women and only a small percentage of women occupy the top positions. “We have a number of HR policies for the benefit of women however we offer them on a case-to-case basis so that people do not take advantage of the company’s flexible policies,” said Falguni Shah, associate director, Tax and Regulatory Service for PWC. She said the company took steps to train women on networking tips so that they could feel comfortable in business gatherings.
Industry representatives say that with domestic responsibilities, women have to make difficult choices between managing work and home and often lose out on professional advancements as a result.
“Women are not very comfortable about pushing themselves professionally and often feel a sense of guilt when they do so at the expense of their domestic responsbilities,” said Priya Chetty-Rajagopal, convener of the CII Karnataka Women Business Leaders Forum.
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, CMD of Biocon felt that the general feeling in companies was that there were very few women on the boards and that the pool of prospective candidates was very less compared to the demand. She made a case for women to be aggressive in networking and raising their profiles by being visible.
