Pay gaps, uneven representation: Tech sector far from gender parity

The imbalance is more evident in the compensation offered to male and female employees in the IT sector

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, the global parity score stood at 68.1 per cent in 2022 and it will take 132 years to reach full parity. India’s Information Technology Enabled Services (ITeS) and software sector – one of the country’s leading women employers — is no exception to this inequality.

The subject of diversity and inclusion (D&I) in corporate boardrooms is not new. Still, the annual reports of India’s leading IT services companies indicate a large gender gap, especially in senior positions.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) claims that it is one of the largest employers of women in the world, with over 210,000 female employees which is over 35 per cent of its global workforce. The share of women employees drops to a smaller minority for higher positions at the IT giant. Around 31.1 per cent of mid-level roles and just 13.3 per cent of senior-level roles were held by women as of March 2022. TCS in its annual report said the percentage of women working at the mid and senior levels improved over the last 5 years.

At Infosys, women employees formed about 39.6 per cent of the total headcount in March 2022, while 25 per cent of its board members were women. Women represented 28 per cent of the global workforce of HCL Tech and formed over 30 per cent of the board of directors.

The gender disparity becomes more explicit when it comes to the compensation offered to male and female employees. Online coding education platform Coding Ninja has released data showing a persistent gender pay gap in India's technology industry, even as the gap in average total compensation level was somewhat bridged.

Men continue to receive the higher packages, as per the platform’s internal survey of salaries offered to its students, including recent graduates and experienced professionals. The highest salary reported on the platform in the past two years for men was Rs 1 crore, while the highest reported salary for women was Rs 48 lakh.

There are a few numbers that show a positive trend, one is the number of women getting hired has gone up but it need not mean their salaries too are improving. 

Data from Quess IT staffing indicates that females accounted for 41 per cent of all entry-level IT and software engineer roles in 2022. The intent for female candidates across tech roles has surged in the last three years Quess said. The most popular skills they were being hired for included Data Analytics (33 per cent), Data Visualization (16 per cent), Full Stack Developers (8 per cent), React/Angular/Node JS Developers (7 per cent), and UI/UX Developers (7 per cent).

Divya Nagarajan, Vice President at Quess IT Staffing said: “Compensation can vary significantly across companies, depending on factors such as industry, company size, location, and talent demand. However, on average we have noticed that most entry-level male candidates are offered about Rs 4 lakh per annum for technical roles and female candidates have offered Rs 3.75 lakh

Global professional services and consultancy bellwether Accenture 2017 set a goal to achieve a gender-balanced workforce by 2025. It has also fixed a global goal of growing the percentage of women managing directors at Accenture to 30 per cent globally by 2025.

“Today, our gender metrics in India reflect the progress we have made on our global goal – approximately 47 per cent of our 300,000+ people in India are women and nearly 26 per cent of our leadership roles are held by women,” Lakshmi C, Managing Director and Lead – HR, Accenture in India told Business Standard.

She added that there was a deliberate focus on “sensitizing people managers and other decision-makers” to eliminate any unconscious bias and take an equality-based approach to our people’s career growth.

“Just hiring more women is not enough; we need to continuously invest in helping our women build enduring and meaningful careers. We make differentiated investments to build functional and leadership skills among our women across career levels and create enabling structures that help women stay in the workforce. This includes flexible work options, benefits that provide for caregiving support and gender-neutral policies that focus on the role of a caregiver,” she said.