How IIM Kozhikode changed the game

NEW DELHI: In 2012, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, Kerala, became the first IIM to take steps to have more women in its classes. Last year, it added 60 supernumerary seats for them. Its director Debashis Chatterjee tells Careers360 why it makes “business sense” to have more women MBAs and why recruiters are showing greater interest in hiring them.

The addition of the seats was just one of a host of measures you took to increase gender diversity. Why did you make that effort at all?

If you take out diversity, you run a monolith for 50 years. The IIMs have been around since 1961. First, I looked at the data on gender diversity for the 50 years, the presence of women through CAT scores.

In the top three IIMs (Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta), women’s representation was about 8-10 percent. The playing field is skewed against girls. After 20-odd years, the parents’ attention is on boys. They want to send boys to coaching centres. With girls, it is divided between marriage and other things. There isn’t equal emphasis.

These lenses (tests) measure test-taking ability, not managerial ability.

In 2012, we looked at Class 10 and 12 scores as additional inputs. In Class 10, there’s less discrimination. With these scores as factors, girls began to get into the interviews more. I got a lot of flak from my peers.

Why were you criticised?

People said I was tampering with meritocracy. But in 2012, the government had also started saying gender diversity is critical and Parliament should have equal representation. The tide of the times saved me although there was opposition from sister institutions and from our women faculty, which was surprising. Girls who had made it earlier found this inappropriate.

Even the women students were unhappy?

They thought their hard work to beat the system would be diluted. I was vindicated when we looked at placements for boys and girls in the first year of summer placements and found the ratio had shifted to girls. Out of the first 100 jobs, 60 went to girls. This was indicative of where industry was going.

Recruiters said it was their mandate to keep the ratio of management trainees equal. Where were they going to get that diversity from unless the IIMs had equal representation? This changed the ecology. In 2012, IIM Kozhikode had 54 percent women in the ranks.

Subsequently, every IIM was forced to increase the ratio. Today, the gender diversity ratio in all IIMs together is about 30 percent. The NIRF [the National Institutional Ranking Framework] has included gender diversity as a necessary core for ranking institutions. So legislation supports that which, in the fitness of things, is the right thing to do.

There was a dip in the ratio in 2017.

That was largely because you reach a point of saturation where the same pool gets distributed across the new IIMs. All the new IIMs want more women in the system. We are struggling to get them now. We are getting about 30 percent and we started it all.

What else did you do differently?

I recomposed the board with the chairman last year. We needed more women and now we have about 40 percent, the largest female representation on the board of governors. This is going to be good for our institutions, our boardrooms, our country. It is not purely an idealistic stand. It makes sense for the corporations. Considering the competencies that we are looking at on the cusp of the AI (artificial intelligence) revolution, women will have a far greater leverage.

Could you elaborate on that?

The urge to connect is primary. Technology only amplifies that urge. Women have traditionally not been part of the hierarchical top-down but have always had much greater lateral advantage – they have been greater networkers, able to build consensus.

There are exceptions – we’re not stereotyping here – but it is the learned history of women to deal in this manner. What was a natural advantage has translated into a corporate advantage. Corporations are demanding more of those skills.

Do you find this reflected in the placements?

Yes! If you benchmark placement quality in terms of recruitment by the top three consulting firms -- Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group -- we placed an equal number of boys and girls in them last year. Top consulting firms have always had more boys than girls. For the first time we saw a shift. That shows what’s being done here is being perceived as the right thing to do.

Has any measure failed or had an unexpected outcome?

Bright boys and girls aren’t always there for the asking. Last year, we tried to get women who represented India in sports or entertainment. But that did not work out. They probably thought that going back to studying will be a problem. They don’t want to be shown up as mortals, right? However, we gave scholarships to all six categories – women, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, disabled, economically backward and general category students.

We want some degree of equity in the system. Contrary to what most people believe, diversity does not dilute meritocracy but enables students to get a richer harvest of ideas. We are talking about diversity as a way of accommodating talent pool.

How does having more women joining alter the culture of the institution?

People say in this place everyone is welcome, there’s a human aspect to IIM-K. When girls came in greater numbers, boys started dressing better, the language of conversation changed, fewer swear words were used and the quality of discussion improved.

When you consider the perspective from where the class used to see, it was of a male-dominated class. The perspective would be largely skewed toward the learning history of these boys. They were goal-focussed, combative.

When women came in, a different nuance was added to the discussion. Professors had to pitch the class very differently. With an equal number of boys and girls, you don’t crack the same jokes, you are careful about how to address your students. These are very subtle shifts but they change the whole atmosphere.

We had to readjust the infrastructure. Our initial architects did not anticipate an equal number of women. Now we have the notion of shared hostels. We had to build more toilets. All that changed. That’s good because it allows access. Because of what IIM-K did in 2012, now there would be about 2,000 women in the IIM system who would not have been there otherwise. When they become CEOs, organisations will be very different.

Do you have enough women faculty members?

They are very difficult to get because of the [limited] PhD pool but we have about 15 percent. It was much worse, 5-6 percent earlier. There is a conscious attempt to get more women into the faculty.

What prompted you to have 60 supernumerary seats for women?

These 60 supernumerary seats were to make sure that no matter what the admissions criteria are, we’ll have 60 women. We wanted to instil the idea of gender diversity as a requirement. There are organisations that don’t recruit till they find a woman. They want recruitment to be predicated upon finding diversity. We wanted to make sure we have that.

If you hone the lenses of the search, you begin to see capability. We try to figure out what makes a person a good manager.

It’s not about what you’ve achieved so far but about where you started. If I start from a small town in Bihar and reached an IIM, that journey is much greater than starting at St.Stephen’s College. You have to see the trajectory but that cannot be mapped through one exam. That is why it is not an equal playing field.

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