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India, Inc.s hottest geeks are women

When you talk to herabout IT in India you talk Narayan Murthy, Vivek Paul, Rajesh Hukku and whole lot of other poster-boys. When you talk about IT globally you would similarly name Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and — Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, Meg Whitman of eBay, Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, Patricia Russo of Lucent Technologies.

Globally, women are right up there in the world of tech. All this might lead you to conclude that in India, women and IT do not mix. That Indian women would prefer right brained jobs to the more structured left-brain orientation that IT requires. That C++ is a language for the boys and for the girls it’s English.

Hang up those stereotypes! For as a women’s activist once said, “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. You might as well speak of a female liver.” Indian IT women are showing that they can stand shoulder to shoulder with the boys. While India may not have a poster-girl in IT yet, it’s only a matter of time before one emerges.

There are plenty of women making their presence felt by leading critical functions in core technology operations, spearheading their company’s entry into newer businesses and even turning entrepreneurs. In reality, the Indian situation’s much brighter than in the US.

Consider these figures: according to Catalyst, a US-based women’s business advocacy organisation, only 11% of corporate officers in America’s top 500 technology companies are women, whereas the top Indian IT companies have more than 20% of women on their rolls. That’s way above the representation of women in the banking or manufacturing sectors.

So what has inhibited the ladies from going all the way to the top? Is it, as the late Canadian social activist Charlotte Whitton once said, “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.“ Not quite. For starters, it’s a young industry and many big Indian firms are still run by their promoters, most of them happen to be men.

Anita Ramachandran, managing partner, Cerebrus Consulting, an HR consultancy firm, says “ It takes around 15 years for anyone to reach senior positions in an organisation. You just need to have staying power, which I believe today’s women engineers have,” she says. Padma Parthasarathy, head financial services, Perot Systems TSI, who has worked across three continents, believes that India offers more opportunities for women than the US. “In the US, there is more resistance towards women and minorities and the pay discrimination is more obvious. In India such things hardly exist.”

The other issue is that of mentorship. Given the relatively low number of women in top management — at Wipro, women constitute only 5% of the senior management and at i-flex, the figure is 12% — there are not enough role models and mentors to help put things in perspective.

Which is where senior women executives are stepping in to encourage their juniors to start playing the game — literally. Says Lathika Pai founder and COO, B2K Corp, “I often warm-up with my clients on the golf course and encourage others to learn the game.”

Most women also seem to be shy when it comes to talking about their achievements, and this often works against them.

“A crucial problem is women don’t look at marketing themselves well, simply because it never occurs to them.” says Vanaja Arvind, COO & ED, Thinksoft Global. Sonal Agrawal, senior partner of head hunting firm Accord is of the view that “women typically tend to be less politically attuned and less aggressive in projecting themselves, and hence often lose out in the rat race.”

Read More @ India, Inc.'s hottest geeks are women - The Economic Times