Why India's B-schools should take the issue of gender parity more seriously

For Niharika Saxena, a one-year executive MBA student at IIM Ahmedabad, the course’s rigorous curriculum and transformative approach to learning is proving instrumental in shaping her critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. For women students like her, even a one-year management course from one of the premier institutes in India creates massive opportunities. “Individuals from various backgrounds such as law, army and medicine have come together here to create a rich tapestry of perspective, and the curriculum is designed to challenge and stretch the students’ intellectual boundaries. It pushes us to think critically and analyse complex management problems from various angles, and turns us into active problem solvers, ready to tackle any challenge,” she says. 

But there’s a hitch. The number of top women leaders in corporate India is appallingly low. A recent report by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has revealed that women hold only 14 per cent of the top executive positions in India’s Top 500 companies by market capitalisation. Considering that women make up almost half of India’s population of 1.4 billion, this figure is startlingly low. Further, the scarcity of women executives within big corporates stems from the marginal share of women students in most top 
Indian business schools and corporate training programmes. This under-representation, experts point 
out, raises crucial questions about the systemic barriers that hinder women’s entry into business education and their subsequent ascension to leadership roles. 

While one hopes that starry-eyed women students like Saxena climb up the corporate ladder and add to the pool of talent in India’s boardrooms someday, the gender gap at top Indian B-schools is still far from balanced. In fact, it’s amongst the worst, as shown by the AMBA Application and Enrolment Report 2022. Per the report, India had the most unequal cohorts of MBA aspirants for gender, with only 19 per cent women applicants and 20 per cent enrollees in 2021. In contrast, China (including Hong Kong) came out on top as the world’s most gender-balanced region in terms of MBA education, with 49 per cent women applicants and 50 per cent enrollees. So, what is the source of the problem?

Most B-school professors in India are of the view that the ‘CAT-bias’ that persists in admission top B-schools in India consider as a benchmark for MBA admissions. “CAT-bias is definitely there. And when you go to lower-ranked B-schools, they take admissions through CAT, MAT (Management Aptitude Test),  ATMA (AIMS Test for Management Admissions), and many other exam scores, so naturally, the pool of female candidates improves,” says Sangeeta Shah Bhardwaj, Acting Director of Management Development Institute (MDI) Gurgaon. Consequently, lower ranked B-schools show better gender ratios compared to the top B-schools in the country. “If your input is biased and skewed, then your output will also be skewed. So, one of the reasons why the gender ratio is not improving is the skewed input; for example, the CAT-bias,” she adds. “However, most of the B-schools are trying to improve that ratio by supporting gender diversity, by giving some weightage to female students, or some other type of initiative.” 

Suresh K. Jakhar, Associate Professor at IIM Lucknow (IIML) feels that the CAT slightly favours students from engineering backgrounds or those with good quantitative aptitude. “That’s why male engineers perform well in CAT, draw a percentile and there, the representation of women is usually not as expected. Over time there has been a lot of discussion about CAT and we are continuously analysing and updating  the exam,” he says. But according to him, the problem is deeper than just the CAT-bias. “In India, a major  part of the country still lives in Tier II and III cities and villages. The mindset of families towards the girl child doing an MBA and working in a corporate, is missing,” he adds. “The problem lies at the grassroots level, at the school level. Very few women will go to senior secondary school. We need to be more focussed on school education of women.”

Jakhar’s deduction points towards the right direction. The low gender ratios in top Indian B-schools is because of an intersection of social, cultural and institutional factors, such as cultural biases that assign traditional gender roles, societal expectations, and a lack of support systems—both economic and academic.

But that doesn’t mean it’s all gloom and doom. Bhardwaj says that in just the past two years, she has seen the gender ratio at her institute improve substantially. “Two years ago, the ratio was 25 per cent. This year, it’s 67 per cent. It’s a big jump and it has happened because of our policies,” she says proudly.

Sougata Ray, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship Practice, and Chair Professor and Executive Director, Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise at Indian School of Business (ISB), says that as a first response to improve the gender ratios in their batches, B-schools have adopted a multi-pronged strategy in the past 10-12 years with reasonable success. “In IIM Calcutta and other leading IIMs, there used to be only 8-10 per cent women in their MBA class before 2010. In the past decade, that has steadily increased to 30-33 per cent and in some IIMs it has crossed 40 per cent. Among the top schools, ISB has been consistently doing the best in the recent years with gender ratio hovering around 50 per cent. Some of these schools have also developed specific programmes for women executives and women members of the business families,” he says.

Ray believes that having more women in the faculty and academic leadership roles make a significant difference. “B-schools are encouraging more women faculty and leaders. Seeing is believing. Women students will have more role models. When you talk of leadership roles in the corporates, there used to be only one woman out of 10 potential candidates in the pool. Naturally, the odds of getting up the ladder used to be stacked heavily against her,” he says. “If corporates don’t get a pool of more MBA women, they’ll have a problem of diversity in the leadership roles. It’s the whole chain that we need to break and fast.”

Jakhar agrees that having a woman director and faculty helps. “In the past three to four years, more than 50 per cent of the new hires were women. For IIM Lucknow, our Director is a woman and she is very proactive about this. In our entrance [exam] and interviews, sometimes we give women extra weightage and we’re trying to have more women’s representation. The India story would be incomplete if we don’t have women’s representation,” he says. The historical challenge for top B-schools, according to Ray, has been to maintain the quality of students on parameters like quantitative skills and mathematical reasoning while promoting gender diversity. “Maintaining that balance between the narrowly defined notion of quality and gender diversity has been a challenge. Besides, particularly for IIMs, everything they do is in the public domain. They need to be cautious so that nobody can turn up tomorrow and say they are using discriminatory processes or accuse them of favouritism.” Lower-ranked schools, he says, “latch on to diversity brownie points”, since most rankings have diversity as one of the important benchmarks, and quality of the students count for little. They are not subjected to public scrutiny unlike the IIMs. Perhaps this explains why some lower-ranked schools have great diversity rankings. “The supply chain is critical to accelerate gender diversity across the board. If more women are getting into good undergraduate colleges and willing to pursue professional careers, there will be no compromise on quality of intake in whatsoever way it is defined. That will eventually be reflected in the consistency of gender-diverse and quality students in our MBA schools,” he says.

Bharat Bhasker, Director of IIM Ahmedabad, too, doesn’t believe quotas or special promotion for women would help their case, but he does agree that there are other ways to improve gender diversity in B-schools, such as encouraging women to be a part of the interview pool and having a diverse range of subjects. “We used to get 90 per cent of our class from engineering backgrounds, and there was a lack of diversity because the pipeline itself had a large number of engineers, who were mostly males. We have diversified our subjects; we don’t want most students in our classes to be engineers. You need to have a variety of people—from arts, commerce, design, fashion technology, etc.,” he says. “By improving the subject diversity, we’ve indirectly encouraged women. The next step is to create a specific executive education programme for women where we train them with management capabilities, and in order to subsidise that, we’ve tied up with corporates where 75 per cent of the fees will be paid by them,” he explains.

After all, it’s a cultural issue, he says. “We have to move away from the perception that women are only good for softer courses. It will take another generation to reach that goal.”

@PLidhoo