Top 3 IIMs see rise in gender parity

At 31%, IIM Calcutta has posted its highest share of female candidates among its 462 strong batch

Efforts in the pre-interview screening and increased weightage in shortlisting has resulted in the top three Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) posting a better gender and discipline diversity this year over the past few years.

For instance, at 31 per cent, IIM Calcutta has posted its highest share of female candidates among its 462 strong batch. As against 16.5 per cent in the previous batch of 2016-18, IIM-C saw share of female candidates rise to 31 per cent or 145 students in 2017-19 batch, its highest ever.

IIM Bangalore too which saw a rise in its female students ratio to 28 per cent in 2016-18 batch, maintained it this year as well for its 405 strong 2017-19 batch.

Even on the discipline front, the top three IIMs have seen the same rise in diversity. While IIM Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is yet to release its latest batch profile, last year the institute had seen share of non-engineers in its 2016-18 batch grow to 20 per cent, the highest in the past five years, as well as 21 per cent female students, a significant increase over the previous batch.

According to IIMs, the rise in gender and discipline diversity has come on the back of certain changes being done in the admission process without comprising on merit of the candidates.

"Our objective is to have more diversity in classroom in any form. We, hence, made minor modification in our policy for the pre-interview phase of shortlisting candidates as well as the merit list prepared on the basis of the interview," said Preetam Basu, chairperson admissions at IIM Calcutta.

For the pre-interview shortlisting phase, IIM Calcutta changed the weightage policy from 67, 15, 15 and 3 out of 100 for CAT score, Class X score, Class XII score and gender diversity last year to 28, 10, 10 and 2, respectively, thereby strengthening the weightage on gender diversity.

As per data shared by IIM Bangalore, the premier B-school has seen ratio of commerce students bagging seats at IIM-B rise from six per cent in the previous batch to eight per cent. For IIM Calcutta, the share of non-engineers stood at nine per cent as last year.

Even in terms of work experience, from 76 per cent last year, IIM Bangalore saw the same rise to 80 per cent of batch having work experience, averaging around 30 months.

Meanwhile, out of the students with engineering background, 29 per cent are from the IITs as against 22 per cent last year, and 23 per cent are from NITs as against 20 per cent last year.