BackTCS set to cross 100,000 women employees
The company says women comprise 32.7% of its 305,431 consolidated workforce
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Mumbai: Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), India’s largest software services exporter, employs 99,875 women employees, just 125 short of the 100,000 mark.
The company said on Thursday that women now comprise 32.7% of its 305,431 consolidated workforce, making it also the largest employer of women among private sector companies. TCS had 98,122 women employees as on 31 March.
Speaking on the sidelines of the company’s June quarter earnings, Ajoyendra Mukherjee, executive vice-president and head of global human resources at TCS said, “We are on track to hire 55,000 this year. We made 25,000 campus hires of whom 3,000 joined us this quarter, with the rest slated to join us in subsequent quarters. About 38-40% of campus hires are women."
The company added 4,967 employees (excluding trainees) during the June quarter but did not give the break-up of women employee additions.
“This makes it the largest employer of women in the private sector, overtaking even banking and retail sectors, which have traditionally had more number of women," said Rajiv Krishnan, partner and leader (people and organization) at consulting firm EY.
The IT sector employs one million women of the total 3.1 million people employed according to software lobby body, Nasscom.
As on 31 March, Infosys Ltd had 160,405 employees, of which about 34% were women, Wipro Ltd had 146,000 employees, 30% of whom were women and for HCL Technologies Ltd, 25% of the company’s 90,190-strong workforce were women.
IT companies in India, now join the global league of companies like Google Inc., Facebook Corp. and Yahoo Inc. for whom women constitute about 30% of their total workforce.
“This is a healthy number and representative of the percentage in the IT industry," said Hema Ravichandar, a strategic HR expert.
Every year, 600,000 engineers graduate, of whom 36% are women. While the IT sector employs 30% women, for other core sectors the number is between 7% and 10%, according to Aspiring Minds, National employability report 2014.
More women join IT companies as the conditions and nature of work creates a more level-playing field for them. IT companies, too, have been trying to meet the business challenge of talent shortage by addressing gender diversity proactively, said Ravichandar, who was the former HR head of Infosys.
Though, the number of women in the workforce in IT companies is a significant percentage, there are few women that occupy senior executive positions.
“We see this even in our executive MBA programme (for senior management). While the number of women in our MBA programme is about 30%, in the executive programme we run for chief information officers, that number drops to 8%," said Deepa Mani, assistant professor, Information Systems and joint executive director, Indian School of Business.
Krishnan, cited above, believes that over the next decade, companies in India will see more women in senior management roles, as more women have begun opting for MBAs since the nineties as compared to the eighties.
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