Hyderabad: Women may have emerged as a force to reckon with in certain sectors such as retail, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), IT/ITeS, and even pharma and healthcare, but they continue to face pay disparity compared to their male counterparts.
While this pay gap is the highest at 35-40% in sectors such as retail and manufacturing, in BFSI it ranges from 15-17%, and in IT/ITeS it is in the 10-17% range. In pharma and healthcare, it is around 10%, according to data provided by TeamLease Digital.
Explaining the reason behind the paradoxical situation where, despite a higher number of women being increasingly employed, their salary packages continue to lag behind their male colleagues, Krishna Vij, Vice-President, TeamLease Digital, it is driven primarily by higher women’s representation in lower-paying jobs and under-representation in leadership roles.
“There is also the leaky pipeline phenomenon at work here. At the mid-level, many women drop out as they face challenges balancing work and family life. At the mid-level, they also lack mentorship, due to which they encounter limited opportunities for advancement,” explains Vij.
Take, for instance, the retail sector. Though women dominate frontline jobs like sales and customer service, these are typically low-paying, and the leadership roles, especially in corporate strategy or supply chain management, are often occupied by men.
On the other hand, the high 35-40% pay gap in the manufacturing sector stems from the significant gender imbalance, wherein roles in factory settings are heavily male-dominated, with women concentrated mainly in administrative, HR, and quality control functions that are lower paying compared to technical and production roles that are mostly held by men, says the staffing firm.
When it comes to IT/ITeS too, despite women constituting a growing part of the workforce, they are underrepresented in high-paying technical and leadership roles.
Aseem Marwaha, Founder, eLitmus, points out that the pendulum has swung to the other extreme at the junior level, which is the 0-10 years work experience band and the 22-35 years age bracket, thanks to the gender diversity push of IT companies. “Every company going to campus to hire engineers is going with a target to hire 50% women when less than 28% of engineering graduates are women as per AICTE. Every company that works with us has a 50% diversity target,” he explains.
But Vij points to the lack of women in niche technical fields like AI, ML, and cybersecurity, where salaries tend to be higher. “Specialised tech roles, such as Data Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Full Stack Engineers, and Product Managers, witness a much larger gap—sometimes soaring as high as 30%,” she explains.
