18.7.22

IIM Raipur creates history, admits more girls than boys

At a time when management institutes across the world are trying to bring gender parity in male dominated classrooms of business education, a young Indian Institute of Management has made history by admitting more girls than boys this year.

In the cohort of 2022, IIM Raipur has 205 girls compared to 125 boys — thus overturning the gender equation on campus that had admitted 146 boys and 120 girls last year. Now, the institute has 20% more girls than boys in the flagship post graduate programme in management.

Meanwhile, IIM Kozhikode, which for one year in 2019 set aside 60 supernumerary seats for women, has seen the share of women candidates admitted in 2022 at 46.7%.

Apart from Raipur and Kozhikode, while many IIMs have crossed the mark of having 30% women this year, others such as IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Calcutta are slowly inching closer to that. A 2021 application trend survey by GMAC revealed that more women than men had applied to join B-schools around the world. And that is reflective in the incoming batch of B-school freshers in India too.

IIM Raipur is an example where this trend played out imposingly. The institute’s admission process was gender-blind: Neither did it alter its selection process nor the interview panel. No additional marks were doled out to women candidates. “Our BoG (board of governors) chairperson is a woman. Inside the campus, there is a fair amount of change we have brought about that is gender neutral. We have sent out a lot of signals of gender neutrality, directly and indirectly. Raipur is also considered to be a safe location. Some of the women candidates abandoned better institutes and joined Raipur,” said the 12-year-young institute’s director Ramkumar Kakani.

IIM Kozhikode stands alongside Harvard Business School and Oxford Said as one of the most balanced MBA programmes in the world. Diversity sits at its core with strong women power in its board of governors and among faculty.

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