Levelling The Field

Over the past decade, IIMs have tweaked their admission policies to encourage more women to join. Their efforts are bearing fruit.

- Abhay Anand

For over half a century, India’s pre-mier business schools were collec-tively seen as a male bastion. That is now changing.

Since the beginning of this decade, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), especially the new ones, have made a conscious effort to improve gender diversity on their campuses. There is no policy as such across the institutions, but each one has tweaked its admission process to give women a better chance.

These measures were in response to the findings that in the prior years, close to 90 percent of the new entrants were male and engineers. The IIMs decided to correct this skewed ratio by giving extra weightage to women and candidates from other academic backgrounds in their admission processes.

While there is a long way to go before the gender ratio is equal, some progress has clearly been made. In the 2019 batch, over 30 percent of the new entrants are women.

Levelling the playing field

Nayanika Bhatnagar secured admission in IIM Udaipur which has introduced a range of measures that favour women candidates. “It feels great to know that I’m part of a premier B-School in India. The experience here is very different and very new to me. In just three months, I can say that I have learned many things and have completed tasks that I previously thought were impossible for me,” she said.