B-Schools in India have drawn flak for having too many men and engineers as students. This is now changing and B-Schools are reporting a healthy male to female ratio in their One Year MBA courses – the first and only globally accredited MBA courses in India. IIM B is the latest B-School to announce a further improvement in the number of women in its MBA (EPGP) Class of 2015.
Indian B-Schools are full of male engineers! This is a common perception. Look a little closer however and you will realise that this is true largely for pre-experience Masters in Business Management (two-year PGP/ PGDM) courses at Indian B-Schools. While packaged as MBAs, these MBM courses induct largely freshers. Since there is little else to judge freshers on except their performance on a standardized exam like the CAT, B-Schools in India rely entirely on scores for initial shortlisting to these programmes.
The CAT exam which is used by a host of Indian B-Schools is focused on math and historically engineering students, a lot of whom are men, fared well on the exam. This led to an abysmally low intake of women in Indian B-Schools.
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But this story is changing thanks to the first bonafide MBA courses in India – One Year MBAs. Most B-Schools use GMAT scores as one of the ways to judge aspirants for this course and GMAT tests application and speed rather than higher mathematical concepts. This, coupled with an enlightened and holistic admission process for One Year MBA courses (that closely follows the admission process of B-Schools abroad) that shortlists students on not just scores but quality of work experience, future aims and multiple other factors has led to the rise of a new type of MBA applicant in India.
Doctors, Women, Sportspeople, Scientists, who otherwise would have skipped Indian B-Schools with their rigid and dogmatic shortlisting policies for the pre-experience courses, are suddenly applying to the same B-Schools in droves.
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IIM B is the latest to report a record number of women students in its One Year MBA Class of 2016 (Executive Post Graduate Programme in Management). ISB and IIM A are some of the other B-Schools which have reported a healthy number of women in their One Year MBA Class.
The new batch at IIM B has 19 women in a batch of 72 participants. Last year’s batch had 5 women in a batch of 58 students. Women comprise 26.4% of the new batch, the highest rise in the one year full time residential MBA programme since its inception. The average age of women in the new batch is around 31 years, and there are four married women with children.
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Students in the MBA Class include Kritika Sriram, who previously managed the US retail market for Google, Nilanjana Roy, an associate advanced specialist in Goldman Sachs Treasury, Manisha Balasubramanya Aithal, a senior partner with GVK EMRI and Vidhyapriya Chandrasekaran, an enterprise resource planning advisor at Dell.
“With over eight and a half years of functional management experience at Google and e-commerce start-up Koovs.com, I wanted to transition into a senior leadership role. An MBA from IIM-B would equip me with the multi-disciplinary skills and business acumen required to develop a holistic picture of business and tackle emerging challenges innovatively,” said Sriram, speaking to the Economic Times.
“To progress further at this juncture of my career, I need to plug the gap in my business qualifications. IIM B’s ‘Shikshu’ initiative would offer an avenue to engage with industry professionals, providing me with a unique platform to acquire the necessary skills, said Nilanjana Roy.
Gender diversity is only one of the outcomes of the evolved admission processes for the One Year MBA. Diversity of work-experience, educational backgrounds and mindsets are other spinoffs. It is not uncommon to find doctors, veterans from the defence forces, CAs, Investment bankers, Advertising Creative Directors in a One Year MBA programme.
This is what an MBA Class is meant to look like and finally Indian MBA courses are coming of age!
(With inputs from the Economic Times)