Attrition too becoming gender-specific?

If wishes were horses, IT and ITeS companies would have hoped to rein in attrition and ride their way to success. But attrition seems to be one issue that never subsides. In fact, it resurfaces time and again to make all of us believe that probably these companies will have to continue to live with it.

So while some employees leave for better prospects or higher studies, others do so for reasons pertaining to marriage. But are the reasons for leaving an organisation gender-specific?

SumTotal Systems, for instance, employs 40 females as compared to 173 males. Of the 29 people who have left SumTotal since January 2005, five have been women. While most of the men have left for better prospects, four out of the five women have done so for family reasons.

According to Lekha Sishta, director (performance development), SumTotal Systems, "Indian women are not as career-oriented as men. They are not over-ambitious but we do seek to employ more women as not only are they productive but they also seem to be more loyal to an organisation. We also tend to see lower attrition rates among women employees as compared to their male counterparts."

Sishta adds that, nevertheless, men are becoming more family-oriented than what they were before.

Lav Nigam, managing director, Cendura Software Pvt Ltd, while agreeing that majority of the women who have left their organisation have done so for reasons like marriage and family, explains, "Most of the time, it is the woman who has to relocate to her husband's place of stay after marriage. This practice has evolved over a long period of time and is accepted as a fact of life."

Nigam, however, believes that there are many women who are career-oriented as well. He has an interesting anecdote to relate wherein a women employee of a company he was heading earlier was adamant on refusing a marriage proposal because she would then have to shift to a new city and therefore a new organisation.

The stalemate continued for a couple of months, with the parents of the girl even approaching Nigam to 'advise' their daughter to accept the proposal. However, as luck would have had it, a couple of months later, the company decided to close its Indian operations, and the girl eventually got married to the boy her parents had approached her for.

Therefore, as a solution to the problem of women leaving an organisation for reasons like marriage, some companies have also started encouraging weddings among their employees.

According to Nigam, Cendura is however neutral in this regard. "That's because if you see the flip side, when one of them decides to leave, the other follows suit, and you lose two employees instead of one," he says. Cendura employs 55 people in Hyderabad with the male-female ratio being 5:1.

Juniper Networks' managing director Sridhar Sarathy, however, believes that things are changing now. "Nowadays, even men leave organisations for reasons like taking care of their old parents and women also seem to be on the lookout for better prospects and higher studies," he reasons. Juniper Networks employs 300 people at its R&D centre in Bangalore with 48 of them being women.

Vinda Chitnis, vice-president (human relations) of Geometric Software Solutions, which employs 1,496 people, agrees that career and professional growth seem to be overtaking reasons like family even for women.

"Irrespective of their gender, employees today leave for pursuing higher studies or for a better career path. In very few cases it is solely related to family issues," Chitnis says.

Radhika Balasubramanian, chief support officer, Intelenet Global Services, also says that their experience with staff who have left in the past showed that most of them leave to pursue higher studies or for better job prospects. Intelenet employs 5,000 people with the male-female ratio being relatively balanced at 60:40.

David Raj, associate director (human relations), Virtusa (India) Pvt Ltd, says that while they have not seen many men leave the organisation for family reasons, some women have left for career growth. He concludes that though reasons for attrition may be gender-specific, loyalty to an organisation isn't. Virtusa employs 1,200 people across Hyderabad and Chennai.