Bharti Airtel aims to have 50% women in its workforce: Amrita Padda

Time of India

16-05-2025

NEW DELHI:
Bharti Airtel
is committed to strengthening gender diversity across its workforce, with a long term vision of achieving a 50% women representation.
'We are currently at around 18.5% women which is still far from the 50% goal I envision, but it's a significant leap from the sub 10% figure we had not very long ago,'
Amrita Padda
, chief people officer, Bharti Airtel said during a keynote address on the occasion of World Telecommunications Day 2025 virtual event organised by ETTelecom.
'Our approach has been fairly simple and focused on just a few things. I would actually call them three. The first one is about matching supply to demand. The second one is about enabling a culture which arrests the leak. And the third one is what I call managing the four M's in a women's career life cycle,' she said.
We have revamped our campus hiring program, now engaging with nearly 100 institutions across 18 states and 30 cities. By targeting a broader range of campuses—including women-only and non-traditional institutions—Airtel has raised women representation in its campus intake to over 60%.
Recognising barriers faced by women due to life events such as marriage, maternity, mobility and medical needs, Airtel also launched a remote work program that empowers qualified women from smaller towns like Chhindwara and Solapur to contribute in tech-led roles from their homes.
The company has set up over 40–50 remote micro-offices using its own technology infrastructure. Additionally, the 'Step-In' returnship program helps women re-enter the workforce after career breaks by directly addressing hiring bias and proactively recruiting women with experience gaps, Padda said..
These targeted initiatives reflect Airtel's commitment to building a more inclusive and diverse workforce, while leveraging technology to unlock talent from across the country, she said.
While talking about retaining women workforce, she mentioned when Airtel sought to increase female participation in field network roles, it identified that a key limiting factor was the low percentage of women with driving licenses in India—a single-digit figure. Subsequently, Airtel introduced a support policy to help women employees obtain driving licenses, removing a practical barrier to entry.
Such targeted solutions help us in creating an inclusive environment not just through headline initiatives, but by embedding inclusivity into the operational fabric of our workforce strategy, Padda added. She also said that at entry levels, women representation is around 38% which drops to 26% in managerial roles and goes down further to around 15%.