IIMs must encourage academic diversity; gender diversity will follow

Avoid quota system

Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, wants to become the first IIM to create 60 additional seats exclusively for women in its flagship post-graduate programme for management. This, media reports said, will help the institute to improve its gender diversity.

Faced with criticism for their largely “male-only, engineer” classrooms, other IIMs have also been trying to encourage gender diversity by tweaking the screening process of applicants. At IIM Bangalore, for example, the proportion of girls in the 2017-19 batch was 28 per cent — the highest ever. IIM Calcutta did even better — a third of the students were girls, compared