Fair play: To celebrate international women's day, Nasscom and tech companies including Google have lined up several initiatives to promote female entrepreneurs
Think Meg Whitman, Marissa Mayer, Virginia Rometty, Ursula Burns. They are women, who are successfully leading top billion dollar technology firms HP, Yahoo!, IBM and Xerox, respectively. However in India, women technology leaders are few and far between.
In an effort to change this, tech companies, on the occasion of International Women's Day, today have lined up with several initiatives to encourage the role of women in the technology sphere in India.
Spearheading this initiative is search engine giant, Google, which has committed $1 million (Rs 6 crore-plus) to Indian IT body Nasscom's 10,000 startups programme, as well as Jagriti Yatra from India, as part of a '#40 Forward' programme under aimed at finding ways to increase women particpation in tech field by 25% in 2014.
Thus, Google's $1 million will be used to aid 40 startup-focused organisations, challenging them to increase the representation of women in their respective tech communities.
Nasscom has also launched the 'Girls in Technology' programme to enhance female representation in the IT-BPM industry, by conducting technical workshops, tech talks and hackathons.
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has also launched a special initiative for women in the corporate and business arena across the states. The initiative called Indian Women Network (IWN), with the theme 'I Am The Change', aims to empower, enable and engage women.
CII IWN has signed MoUs with a few partners such as Healthspring, Enactus, and DSP BlackRock Mutual Fund Winvestor for this initiative.
SAP Labs India is also conducting a women's only recruitment drive in Bangalore, where around 300 women will come to the firm's campus for final round of interviews, after being shortlisted from a pool of 1,500 candidates earlier. Currently, about 32% of SAP Labs's total workforce is women and it aims to increase women in leadership roles to 25% by 2017.
Vodafone, India's number two telecom firm, has also committed to hiring 50% of women trainees from premium institutes as part of its 'Discover Campus Program'. Currently, 18% of Vodafone India's workforce are women; 17 out of 95 zones are headed by women.
HCL Technologies and Wipro said they have received the 2014 Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) Leadership Award, which emphasises the business case for corporate action to promote gender equality and women's empowerment, and is supported by UN Women and the UN Global Compact.
Milagrow HumanTech, India's leading home robots company is offering a basket of Women's Day offers with discounts up to 50% on its range of floor cleaning robots, massaging robots, window cleaning robots and TabTop PCs.
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