An uphill climb at India’s top B-schools

While the percentage of women students enrolled at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in Lucknow and Calcutta has dropped since 2020, other centres of India’s premier business school have reported modest increases.

“I have observed that having mentors, seniors, role models, like, in this case, more women faculty, attracts younger women students,” said Narayanan Ramaswamy, partner and head of the education and skill development practice at KPMG in India.

“Older IIMs have a legacy and established procedures to follow. This makes any change to their current status more gradual compared to their newer counterparts. So while the established B-schools are making efforts to improve women enrolment, it is taking a tad longer for them,” Ramaswamy added.

The struggle to ensure more women students in India’s top B-schools comes even as companies emphasise diversity and inclusion while recruiting, making it crucial for management institutes to have a balanced gender ratio for better campus placements.

At IIM-Visakhapatnam, which was established in 2015, the number of women students has increased from 31% of all students in the 2020-22 batch to 51% in the latest 2025-27 batch. Other new IIMs, however, haven’t had similar success.

IIM-Ranchi, which was established in 2009, saw its gender ratio drop from 39.84% women students in the 2020-22 batch to 26.6% in the 2022-24 batch before rebounding to 41.56% in last year’s batch for the academic year 2024-26.

At IIM-Raipur, which was established in 2010, the percentage of women students dropped from 41% in 2020-22 to 40% last year. However, its 2023-25 batch had 60% women students.

The gender ratios for the Ranchi and Raipur school’s latest batch weren’t available.

A lopsided feeder pool

While the Kozhikode and Indore IIMs, both established in 1996, have more women students than men in their latest batch for the 2025-27 academic year, at IIM-Calcutta (of 1961 vintage) and IIM-Bangalore (1973), male students dominate.

At the Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur (XLRI), which offers one-year MBA programmes, the number of women students has increased from about 37% in 2020-21 to about 46% in the incoming batch of 2025-26.

“This disparity in gender comes from the lopsided feeder pool as CAT (the Common Admission Test for the IIMs)—which is more quantitative and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) heavy—generally has more male takers than females,” said Avntika Tomar, partner at EY-Parthenon, education practice.

“Moreover, despite the campuses making efforts to improve the security and infrastructure of their campuses, the perception of some cities they are located in concerns parents as some of the IIMs are not located in the more desirable metro cities,” Tomar added.

In 2024, out of about 329,000 registered candidates for CAT, only about 119,000 were women.

In the past couple of years, IIMs have had to work harder to secure placements for their students because of a hiring freeze following a post-pandemic hiring frenzy.

The increasing corporate emphasis on diversity and inclusion, however, has India’s premier management schools looking for ways to encourage more women students to enrol.

“IIMs have been focusing more on enrolling more female students, especially with bonus marking,” said a senior official at one of the new IIMs. As part of the IIM admissions process, 2-10 additional points are awarded to women candidates. “This helps in the placement process as corporates prefer recruiting female candidates over men when they have the same merits and calibre,” the official said.

Ria Dalal contributed reporting for this article.