Tech Firms In India Have Only 26% Women Engineers, Survey

It is a known fact that globally there is a dearth of women engineers. However, according to a recent survey undertaken by Belong on 'the gender gap in the tech industry in India' there are only 34 per cent women in the engineering workforce of IT sector. These numbers further reinforce how powerfully big the gender divide is.

"The average number of women (irrespective of their function) in tech companies, we found that the overall representation was 34 per cent," says the survey, ET reports.

The survey that collected data from all IT companies in the country found out that there is only one female engineer for every three male engineers. And overall there are only 26% of women engineers.

Three lakh women participated in the survey and it collected statistics from ITES companies with over 50 employees into consideration.

Another significant finding from the survey by examining the career growth of women and women techies resulted that men move to managerial positions in a firm after six years of experience while it takes women eight years to get to the same managerial position.

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A whopping 45% women quit core engineering roles after around eight years. They shift to marketing, product management or consulting jobs as per the survey.

It found out that more women take up software testing roles rather than core programming roles. Also, job opportunities are scarce in software testing roles as compared to programming. For every 100 testing jobs there are only 34 women employed and 66 men. The case is even worse in programming jobs as women take up only 25% of the workforce.

If 29% women start working in engineering jobs then the percentage drops to 7% in 12 years. The major drop happens in the first five years.

It justified the drop by saying that women quit jobs to start a family and then never return to work. However, now many companies have started schemes to bring back the lost talent back into the workforce.

The disparity starts right at the school level where women aren’t enough encouraged to take STEM courses. While the scenario is changing nowadays we still need to do more.

Picture credit- Anita Borg Institute