Auto companies hiring more women to boost diversity

Most of these companies are hiring women from campuses.

Luxury carmaker Mercedes Benz India has mandated that half of all its hires in the ongoing year be women while homegrown Tata Motors is focusing on gender diversity especially at the shopfloor where 25% of all new recruits are women, according to Ravindra Kumar GP, its chief human resources officer.

The country’s largest automotive company by revenue already has more than 4,500 women actively engaged on the shopfloors of its various plants, working across multiple product lines, rolling out everything from small passenger cars to sports utility vehicles and heavy commercial vehicles.

“In our Pune plant, we have an all-women TCF production line wherein women hailing from some of the remotest parts of Maharashtra are busy assembling our premium SUVs Tata Harrier and Tata Safari,” Kumar told ET. The all-women team plans, executes, and manages every activity on the line end to end, including assembly of all mechanical, electric, and electronic parts and components, he added.

Rival Mahindra & Mahindra, too, is creating a healthy pipeline of diverse talent across functions. “Our emphasis has also been on increasing the intake of women from these campuses which has seen a consistent increase over the past few years,” its CHRO Rajeshwar Tripathi said.

At MG Motor India, women comprise 37% of the workforce across engineering, manufacturing, field, HR, IT, finance, and other functions.MG Motor CEO Emeritus Rajeev Chaba said the company is looking at increasing this to 40% by the end of calendar 2023.

“Gender balance helps in bringing in diverse ideas, innovations and paves the way for sustainable growth of any organisation. We are working to increase the ratio of women in the overall workforce to 50% over the next two years,” Chaba said.

Mercedes Benz India managing director and CEO Santosh Iyer said the carmaker “has a clear focus to increase gender diversity in the workforce”. Recruitments of women in technical functions will be increased by 100% from 50 to 100 going forward, he added.

The country’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki said gender diversity and inclusion is a focus area. “We have been working constantly on promoting the same,” said Rajesh Uppal, MEB (HR, IT, safety, digital enterprise) at Maruti Suzuki.

The country’s largest two-wheeler maker Hero MotoCorp, too, has been scaling up recruitments aligned with gender inclusive policies. “Diversity and inclusiveness are a way of life at Hero MotoCorp. The company is firmly committed to increasing the representation of women across functions and geographies. In 2023, 31% of our campus hires were women, and our aim is to take this up to 50% this year,” a company spokesperson told ET.

Hero MotoCorp is running a ‘Women in Leadership’ programme to train and nurture more women to take up senior leadership roles.