TCS, India's largest IT services company, now employs two lakh women, with gender diversity at the senior leadership level expanding by 68 percent between 2016 and 21.
"TCS crossed a new milestone in its diversity journey in Q3, with the number of women in its workforce crossing 200,000," TCS said in its Q3 FY22 results release. This means that women account for 35% of TCS's workforce. As of December 31, 2021, TCS employs 556,986 workers.
TCS has a 13 percent female leadership team. While Infosys employs 39.6% women, it does not provide information on the number of women in senior positions. A few years ago, Cognizant reached the milestone of employing 1 lakh women.
In recent years, prominent IT organisations have placed a strong emphasis on diversity, both in terms of gender and ethnicity.
TCS in the statement said, “The policy of hiring local talent across the world has resulted in a globally distributed workforce comprising 156 nationalities.”
Thierry Delaporte, Wipro's CEO, told reporters on January 12 that the company's ethnic and gender diversity had improved, with the latter having doubled.
While women make up nearly half of the workforce at the entry level, their numbers decline as they advance in their careers. The talent pipeline has been one of the major challenges. Women make up up to 50% of the workforce at the entry level, but this ratio decreases as they advance through the ranks, due to factors such as marriage and childbearing.
Companies, on the other hand, are aware of the problem and are exploring a variety of options to improve the number. This includes consciously elevating women to positions of leadership.
VV Apparao, Chief Human Resources Officer, HCL Tech said in an earlier interaction, “We are conscious that we need to grow our leadership ranks in terms of women leaders. (Because) we are nowhere close to the 50 percent mark.”
That is why, according to Apparao, the corporation has numerous programmes to train women and place them in senior positions. This includes cross-level promotions.
“Every time there is a promotion cycle we pose a question to the leaders - why not women. If somebody is performing well and has got good ratings in the last 2-3 years, we ask why they are not being promoted and they have to give a plausible answer as to why they are not doing,” he explained.
