Is this the harsh reality?
If you feel Indian companies are bringing in a wave of change by taking initiatives to reduce the gender gap and ensure pay parity at the workplace, unfortunately, the reality is somewhat different. According to a report by World Economic Forum, one in three companies in India prefers hiring men. As per another report by World Bank, even the job advertisements specify the gender of the prospective employee, which is, of course, male in most of the cases. Here are a few findings of these reports that will surely take you by surprise.
The World Bank report
The researchers who carried out the World Bank's report analysed more than 800,000 job advertisements between 2011 and 2017 in both formal and informal sectors. The vacancies ranged across 27 sectors in 20 cities including Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
It’s so shocking
One of the findings suggested that six in every 10 job openings preferred male candidates, and females were preferred for low-quality, low-status and low-paying informal jobs.
Another finding
The report also pointed out that jobs that required a good (more number of years) experience preferred male candidates, which in turn are the senior-level posts. Not just this, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), human resources (HR) firms and staffing companies also showed inclinations towards men over women.
Gender vs Job
Women were given preference for jobs like teaching, BPO, front desk, management, nursing, cooking, house help and others. Men were preferred in occupations including delivery collections, driving, machinist, labourer, watchman, office-helper, gardener, engineering, steward, sales, retail-clerk, cook, IT PRO, garment worker, other, finance, office-clerk.
What World Economic Forum’s study says!
The World Economic Forum’s ‘Future of Work in India’ report has a similar set of astonishing findings. The report took into account 770 companies, ranging from the micro-sized firms to the ones having more than 25,000 employees in banking and finances, transportation and logistics, textiles, retail sector.
The preference remains the same
The report concluded that one in three companies prefers hiring men, and just one in ten companies stated they wanted to hire more female employees. Going by the statistics, 36 per cent companies admitted their preference for hiring men and only 11 per cent wanted to hire more women workers.
2019, please be better!
The reports are surely not very encouraging for women across the country but we hope 2019 will witness more gender-neutral policies in companies and most importantly, a change in mindset of people. That’s the need of the hour!
(All images used here are representational)