India Inc working towards improving workplace diversity

In a bid to attract and retain women employees, India Inc is willing to go an extra mile and has adopted initiatives including maternity benefit, cab facility, sabbatical leave policy, flexi-work policy to improve diversity at workplace.
HR managers believe women's roles and responsibilities have changed over the last decades and there has been an increasing female representation across industries as employers are promoting diversity within the organisation and building a pipeline of women leaders.
As per LinkedIn-WEF Gender Gap report, in India, the average female hiring has increased by 6 per cent across the 12 industries surveyed, with Energy & Mining, Manufacturing and Real Estate showing the highest change in percentage of female hiring rate in the last ten years.

As per LinkedIn Recruiting Trends 2018, diversity is a top trend affecting how talent is hired and it is no longer just seen as an aspect to improve company culture, but as a lever to boost productivity.
Software giant Adobe recently said that it has closed the pay gap between its male and female employees in India. Adobe India has also discontinued the practice of using a candidate's prior remuneration to determine the starting salary offered, an important step to help counter the gender wage gap that candidates may have experienced in prior jobs.
Radhika Ghai, CBO and Co-founder, ShopClues, said, "Last 12 months have also seen a significant increase in the number of women employees hired in our organisation. We jumped from 24 per cent to 35 per cent women employees in the last 12 months due to focused initiatives in talent acquisition".

Armaan Seth, Head of Human Resources, Indian Sub-continent at Philips said the company has women centric HR policies like flexible work schedules, flexible maternity leave, and late night travel assistance. "These help our employees to build careers at their own pace," he said.

In order to make workforce more inclusive, the Swedish home furnishings company IKEA has launched day care centers named as 'DAGIS' (Swedish for day care centers), which will be located within 500 metres of IKEA stores across the country. The first DAGIS is coming up near the IKEA store in Hyderabad and it will be made available to all men and women co-workers.

"It is liberating to note that diversity and inclusion are becoming mainstream conversations across the world. India has made significant progress towards the advancement of women," Roopa Wilson, Diversity & Inclusion Leader, IBM India/South Asia said.
According to Abhishek Agarwal, Senior Vice President, The Judge Group, a Global professional services firm, "Employers who are proactive in motivating women managers will certainly benefit by involving them in the decision-making process at all levels and engaging them in prominent responsibilities.