One out of three employees joining the $143-billion Indian IT-BPO industry is a woman, according to a report by Nasscom.

The findings, which were released on the sidelines of the 9th edition of the Nasscom Diversity and Inclusion Summit 2016, pointed out that the industry which employs 3.7 million people has seen a rise in the number of women joining the sector in 2015.

Nasscom and PwC conducted a survey of Nasscom member companies to get a perspective on how the IT-BPM industry is strengthening its current practices and embracing new emerging trends.

“One third of the workforce are women and it is no longer just support roles such as HR,” said Ashok Pamidi, regional head- Karnataka and National Lead Diversity & Inclusion Initiative. As an example, number of women in support roles have gone down from 37 per cent in 2014 to 34 per cent in 2015. Nasscom, however, did not share the data on the number of women joining the sector in 2014.

Gender equality

The survey also pointed out that while the trend of diversity and inclusion look promising in this sector, India still has a long way to go to become a fully inclusive when compared to developed countries.

While gender equality has been established at entry levels, women still constitute a far lower share of CXO roles; the trend of women resigning at a higher rate than men as their personal priorities change is hampering this growth. This is reflected in some of the numbers.

For instance, women managers have gone up a mere 2 percentage points from 21 per cent in 2012 to 23 per cent in 2014, indicating that cultural factors as well as a not-supportive-work environment have been huge factors in women climbing up the corporate ladder.

Interestingly, the survey points out that compared to 67 per cent of men who spent time on training, women spent 2 percentage more time in training (69 per cent), according to the report.

It also said that 28 per cent of the 1.3 million women in the workforce were sole breadwinners for their family and women entrepreneurs/start-ups received $160 million funding in 2014.

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