Gender diversity on the rise in IIMs

Efforts in the pre-interview screening and increased weightage in shortlisting have resulted in the top three Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) posting a better gender and disciplinary diversity this year over the past few years. For instance, IIM Calcutta (IIM-C) has posted the highest share of female candidates in its batch of 462 students. IIM-C saw the number of female candidates rise up to 31 per cent, or 145 students, in 2017-19 batch, against 16.5 per cent in the batch of 2016-18.

Efforts in the pre-interview screening and increased weight in shortlisting have resulted in the top three Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) posting a better gender and disciplinary diversity this year over the past few years.

For instance, IIM Calcutta (IIM-C) has posted its highest share of female candidates in its batch of 462 students. IIMC saw the number of female candidates rise up to 31 per cent or 145 students in the 2017-19 batch, against 16.5 per cent in the previous batch of 2016-18.

The number of female students in IIM Bangalore (IIM-B) rose to 28 per cent in the 201618 batch. The institution maintained the same for its 405-strong 2017-19 batch.

The top three IIMs have seen a rise in disciplinary diversity as well. While IIM Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is yet to release its latest batch profile, last year the institute had seen the share of non-engineers in its 2016-18 batch grow to 20 per cent, the highest in the past five years. It also saw rise in number of female students, 21 per cent, a significant increase over the previous batch.

According to IIMs, the rise in gender and disciplinary diversity came on the back of certain changes in the admission process, without compromising on merit of the candidates. “Our objective is to have more diversity in classroom in any form. We, hence, made some minor modifications in our policy for the pre-interview phase of shortlisting candidates, as well as the merit list prepared on the basis of the interview,” said Preetam Basu, chairperson admissions at IIM-C.

For the pre-interview shortlisting phase, IIM-C changed the scoring policy from 67, 15, 15 and 3 out of 100 for CAT score, Class X score, Class XII score and gender diversity last year, respectively, to 28, 10, 10 and 2, thereby strengthening the weight on gender diversity.

According to the data shared by IIM-B, the premier B-school has seen ratio of commerce students rise from six per cent in the previous batch to eight per cent. For IIM-C, the share of non-engineers stood at nine per cent, same as last year.

IIM-B saw a rise in the number of students having work experience, 80 per cent from 76 per cent in the previous batch.