Though women’s share in the engineering space has gone up to around 40 per cent at the education level, the employment scenario does not reflect this completely. The percentage of women in the technical field is still dismal as not many prefer STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs, said Vineet Chaturvedi, Co-founder of Edureka.

In a chat with BusinessLine , Chaturvedi noted that lack of awareness could be a major reason. “When it comes to a women’s career, it is no cake walk. There are societal factors that need to be considered. Due to the uncertainty of being able to serve a long-term tenure in a company owing to family issues, women with certain potential tend to miss out on certain job roles.

“A study found that 45 per cent of women graduates from tier-I universities move out of core engineering roles after close to eight years. After quitting engineering, these women mostly move to marketing, product management or consulting as these areas allow them a better work-life balance,” he said.

The study further revealed that there were more women in software testing roles than in core programming roles.

There is a high chance that women in manual testing could lose their jobs to automation testing, Chaturvedi said, emphasising the need for the ones employed in manual testing to update their skills and expand their survival chances in the industry.

Robotic process automation, for instance, is becoming increasingly sophisticated. RPA market is expected to be worth over $6.7 trillion by 2025. It has already found adoption in a variety of industries ranging from BPOs to automobiles to banking.

While New Age technologies such as RPA, AI and automation testing would be the future, they could open up job opportunities. Research studies show that the global IT and BPO services industry, which currently employs 16 million workers, would see a 7.5 per cent decline in total workers to 14.8 million by 2022.

This is, therefore, the right time to expand skill sets across domains. Any tech professional, not just women, should learn New Age technologies to stay relevant and take advantage of emerging opportunities, Chaturvedi added.

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