Zomato leads tech start-ups in gender diversity

A study of 10,000 white-collared employees of Indian technology start-ups by talent acquisition platform Belong revealed that Zomato leads the pack with 41 per cent women in its workforce, followed by Mu Sigma at 30 per cent, and InMobi at 29 per cent.

Rishabh Kaul, co-founder of Belong, told BusinessLine: “One of the recurrent themes from our 70 customers was their need to create gender diversity in the workplace.

“However, they had a hard time finding female candidates for roles across levels. Before building a diversity tool that could assist our customers to proactively recruit women, we wanted to know which of them were most gender diverse.”

The tech start-ups that were considered for the study are: Flipkart, Snapdeal, Zomato, Quikr, InMobi, Mu Sigma, Zoho, ShopClues, Paytm and Ola. Kaul said four of Belong’s 10-member executive team were women.

Zomato which has seven women in top management roles — COO, Vice-President -Finance, Vice-President - Recruitment, Chief of Staff – Product, Vice-President - HR, Vice-President - PR and Communications, and Assistant Vice-President - Neutrality — has no specific gender diversity agenda in place.

“We focus on hiring the best talent and getting the best fit for the role, and are very happy that 41 per cent of our 1,000 employees are women,” said Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder, Zomato.

Kevin Freitas, HR Head at InMobi, said: “While gender diversity is definitely on our agenda, we focus more on increasing thought diversity in our company. All three of our recruitment managers for technology, product and sales are women. Our gender diversity percentage is set to touch 33 per cent this year.”

Belong’s customers are also looking at bringing in diversity in specific teams such asengineering, product management, analytics and marketing that are currently dominated by men.

HR Manager at RazorPay, Anuradha Bharat, who feels talent has to be infused with diversity in order to build a strong team, said: “Around 25 per cent of our team’s strength today can be attributed to women spread across all domains of our business.”

Focus on deliverables Nirmala Menon, founder CEO, Interweave Consulting, who has made it to the top 50 Global Diversity List by The Economist , said: “Indian technology start-ups are focussed on deliverables and will hire the best talent, be it a man or a woman, and don’t really care whether they deliver it from office or home, as long as it is delivered.

“In the process, they are addressing a larger talent pool that includes both men and women, and unlike large organisations, have no systemic biases while hiring. Women like this flexible work culture and once they get comfortable at work, it is much easier to retain them, compared to men.”

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