Lady O'Tools

Derided long enough for not having a head for numbers and shying away from anything remotely technology-related, or dismissed as ultra ‘studious’ if they did make the cut, women are no longer an oddity in engineering institutes across the country. Confirmation comes from Vidya, all of 20, who says there are 25 other girls in her class of 60 at the S.P. College, a private institution affiliated to the Mumbai University. All of a sudden, engineering institutions are witnessing an influx of women students like never before. The percentage of women students opting for engineering went up from 1 per cent in 1975 to 10 per cent in 1990, according to a 2001 study by IIT Mumbai. Cut to industry estimates in 2007, and you discover women are 23 per cent of engineering graduates in India. Most institutes today say 10-25 per cent of their students are women.

Ten out of 70 students in his last class were women, IIT Delhi professor Dr Kiran Seth tells us. "In the last five years, there has been a surge in the number of women students in engineering," he says. "Few women were seen in the engineering classes of the ’70s or ’80s. They are now 30 per cent of the class strength across streams." And far from being a ‘subdued’ lot in male-dominated classes, these women are confident and completely at ease.

But even as the number of women studying engineering is growing, unemployability hasn’t kept pace. The IIT Mumbai 2001 study had noted that the percentage of unemployed women engineers had gone up from 20 per cent in 1990 to 35 per cent in 1998. Shedding some light on the issue, Hitesh Oberoi, COO, Naukri.com, says, "The way India planned its economic development, most industrial belts were in rural areas. In our society, few women wanted to move to these places. That’s why men led in mainstream engineering." But the advent of the service sector possibly changed all that. In a 2007 survey it conducted, Naukri found that 20 per cent of its online job applicants were women but most of them were opting for jobs in outsourcing, information technology and the retail sector. "Women applicants for civil engineering positions are less than 10 per cent," he says, though he adds that the number has grown in the recent past. "If businesses other than services show a similar growth trend, the demand for skills will pull more women towards the factory floor as well." Services opened up avenues for women engineers only about a decade ago, and manufacturing remains an as-yet untapped field. Once that sector embarks on realising their potential, opportunities for women engineers will only escalate.

According to Wng Cdr Arvind K. Poothia, secretary and director general, Institution of Indian Engineers (IIE), which promotes advancement of engineering in India, this is a big change from the past, when an engineering degree was a dead-end qualification for women. "India even has women marine engineers today—a tough and demanding career through which women are challenging the myth that they seek easy, desk-bound careers," Poothia says. At the IIE’s annual gathering of women-only engineers, attendance stood at 500 in 2007, up three times since 150 in 2001, he points out.

Educational institutions too are responding to the demand. Women-only engineering colleges and universities have mushroomed all across the country, be it the MKSS Cummins College for Engineering in Pune or the Idhaya Engineering College for Women in Hyderabad. However Poothia cautions against the trend of getting a degree for the sake of a degree. "The quality of education is more important than the degree," he says. Thankfully, he adds, unlike men, women are not making career choices blindly. He could well be talking of Saima Mohan, a biomedical engineer who teaches at Bangalore’s MS Ramaiah School of Advanced Studies and also conducts industry-relevant research at the institute. "I am interested in research work," says Saima. "This is what I like to do. I’m not too focused on making money." The money isn’t too bad either. Starting salaries for engineering graduates average Rs 15,000 a month; and go up to Rs 50,000 a month if one has a degree from one of the top 20 institutes.

And human resource experts have no complaints from women engineering employees. They tend to be more loyal, and are rarely known to switch jobs for higher salary alone. Make a workplace woman-friendly and you can keep her for a long time. The service sector realised this quite early. "Now the crunch for talent is being felt across sectors. As a result, making the workplace woman-friendly is no longer just a nice-to-do thing but a business imperative," says strategic HR consultant Hema Ravichandar. Hence creches in the office for working mothers or the option of working from home.