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    More women professionals going for GMAT to hone business skills

    Synopsis

    As much as 55% of the women who took GMAT in India this year were working professionals in the 25-plus age group, show data from the Graduate Management Admission Council.

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    While there is an improvement, India is still at the lower end among countries in terms of women taking GMAT test.
    MUMBAI: An increasing number of female professionals in India appear to be keen on gaining management skills, show the composition of candidates seeking admission to top business schools.

    As much as 55% of the women who took the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) in India this year were working professionals in the 25-plus age group, show data from the Graduate Management Admission Council that administers the test. The share of this category of candidates has seen a steady increase in recent years.

    Education and diversity experts attributed this to rising aspiration among women and their confidence in going up in their career. They are also encouraged by the gender diversity initiatives of corporate India, as companies from the technology to manufacturing sectors seek to hire more women, including those who took a break from work, offering them an enabling environment to rise in their careers. “There are many companies that have no bias and want to hire more women into their workforce,” said Chandan Chowdhury, associate dean at Indian School of Business (ISB). “We have companies that come to our campus for hiring only women.”

    ISB has seen an increase in the percentage of women at the institution to 34% in the 2019 batch of 886 students, compared with 29% in 2016 when the class had a total of 812 students. The average experience of students at ISB is five years.

    In fact, the total number of women, including those younger than 25, taking GMAT has increased, show the data.

    In 2018, 32% of the 32,613 students who took GMAT were females, compared with 27% in 2014. In 2014, half the candidates were aged above 25. “Indian women professionals are increasingly becoming intentional about charting their career trajectories,” said Saundarya Rajesh, founder-president of the AVTAR Group, a diversity and inclusion consulting firm.

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    ‘Gender-friendly Policies a Boost’
    AVTAR’s pan-India research on Career Intentionality of Indian Professionals found that for close to 64% of female professionals at the early-career stage, gaining professional expertise was the biggest career aspiration (66% of men also felt so). For 70% of these women, “career achievement” was the main career driver (among men, it was lower at 63%).

    Another survey conducted by JobsFor-Her, an online portal that enables women to restart their careers, also underlined the aspiration among women to climb up the career ladder. On the survey, ‘What can companies do to enable career restart’, 34% of the women mentioned reskilling as a necessity for a career restart, progression, and job role changes.

    While there is an improvement, India is still at the lower end among countries in terms of women taking GMAT test. The global average in 2018 was a record high of 47%. “Women are getting much more interested in options that are available in business,” said Sangeet Chowfla, chief executive officer of the council that conducts GMAT. “Businesses around the world are creating much more genderfriendly policies for female employees. There is much more sensitivity in the corporate world for the needs of women,” he said. “We have a little bit of a lag effect in India which I hope will correct itself over a period of time.”


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