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Journalism of Courage
The profiles of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are changing in favour of women students and humanities. More than a quarter of 2012-14 batch of the postgraduate programme (PGP) at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore comprises women and close to 15% of the students in the batch are non-engineers. Similarly,IIM Lucknow has announced that it has admitted a record 167 girl students in its PGP and PGP-agri-business management batch,while 20% are non-engineers. At IIM Ahmedabad,16.8% of the batch consists of women and 364 of the total 381 are non- engineers.
Even the new IIM at Rohtak boasts of various non-engineering graduates with diverse backgrounds such as dentistry,fashion technology,hotel management,commerce and business administration in its current batch. Interestingly,two of the students are founders of information technology and telecom companies.
These numbers are a clear indication of the premier business schools conscious effort to rebalance the gender and profile scales related to non-engineers. The trend also challenges the monopoly of engineers making it to these management institutes.
The key focus this year was to ensure gender diversity without compromising on merit. One witnessed record increase in the fairer sex a total of 166 female students have been inducted this year, said IIM-L in a statement.
At IIM-L,the batch of 2011-13 saw around 14% of female students whereas this year the total percentage of women students (in both the programmes) is around 37%.
The class of 2014 has 12 female students out of a total of 127 students,thus giving a fillip to the male-female ratio that is less skewed than that of earlier batches, said a student of IIM-Rohtak.
At Delhis Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) which gave up its own entrance test and switched to the Common Admission Test (CAT) in 2011 the number of non-engineers has increased despite the exam being usually cracked by engineers. Of the 226 students this year,41 are girls and 32 come from backgrounds other than engineering,compared with 26 last year.
We were slightly apprehensive when we shifted to CAT scores as we thought it would be easier for engineers to make it but the exam has exceeded our expectations. We are happy that compared with previous years,more non-engineers have made it to the institute, said FMS media secretary Preethi Puram.
