Maruti plans to step up hiring of women engineers in heading critical functions

Sheetal Dhiman, 32, had more than a passing role to play in how Maruti Suzuki’s new Alto responds when you step on the throttle. She and the team of male engineers she leads have a clear mandate — test vehicles and calibrate the engine management system. Sheetal was the only female employee in her department when she joined Maruti Suzuki five years ago.
She started leading her team two years ago. Mugdha Swarnkar, 27, a deputy manager in vehicle integration, has also been leading an all-male team for a year now. She has worked on the Ritz and was involved in body part designing for the new Alto CNG.
“Women do need to put in extra effort to outshine and prove that they are equally capable,” she says, quickly adding that she has never felt discriminated.
Sheetal and Mugdha’s rise to team leads in hardcore auto engineering is inspiration for several young women who want to join the profession. Their kind, though, is only a sprinkling yet in an otherwise male bastion.
“It takes 10 years to get to a senior managerial position, and we already have 10 women in such roles,” says SY Siddiqui, chief operating officer (administration), Maruti Suzuki. “Several women engineers have entered the company in recent years; many more will join this list of senior managers,” he adds.
At Maruti Suzuki, it is no longer uncommon to find women in roles such as engine and transmission design, development and testing, brakes and suspension design, engine and body electricals and styling, modelling and designing of the final product.
Maruti Plans to Step up Hiring of Women
For example, women account for about 13% of engineers in the electrical division, 9% of those working on braking and suspension and about 7% in powertrain engine testing.
India’s largest carmaker is now planning to increase the proportion of new women hires in engineering functions to 15% this fiscal from an average of 10% over the past three years.
The company has planned an increase of 33% in women engineering new hires over last year, compared with a 4% increase in total engineering new hires. Hiring women for R&D roles in a heavy engineering company has traditionally been a challenge. “We have broken that belief and positively enabled employment of women talent at Maruti Suzuki,” says Siddiqui.
“We are expanding our R&D team significantly and are looking to get the best possible talent-…more women are opting for these hardcore engineering functions (now) and they fit our requirement.”
Recruiting women, Siddiqui says, brings a certain balance and diversity in terms of population mix, versatility and value add. It has nothing to do with the labour unrest the company has faced recently.
Such new recruits also walk in with fire in their bellies. “I can prove that even girls can be efficient and effective testers,” says Deepti Mahra, a Graduate Engineer Trainee in the gasoline vehicles testing department.
Mahra, who has done her B-Tech in mechanical engineering from College Of Technology, Pantnagar, had been fascinated by automobiles since early childhood. So when it came to selecting a stream of study, mechanical engineering was the obvious choice.
Maruti hires over 95% of its Graduate Engineer Trainees from campuses such as National Institutes of Technology — including Kurukshetra, Hamirpur, Jalandhar, Jamshedpur, Durgapur, Jaipur, and Bhopal; BITS-Pilani, and Delhi College of Engineering (now Delhi Technological University). It recently also started hiring from women colleges such as Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology.
Traditional male-dominated streams such as mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering are now attracting more female students. But the numbers need to grow a lot more to bring real diversity on factory floors.
Says Sonam Motwani, who heads a 70-member student automobile team at IIT-Bombay: “People have a set image that doesn’t allow them to step into so-called male bastions. I was elected to head the team that builds racing cars for international formula students’ competition. The chief mechanical engineer in my team is also a woman. The IIT structure empowers this.”
There are seven women members on the team. Maruti Suzuki grooms women student engineers even when they are in college. It has adopted two women ITIs, one at Gurgaon and other at Jhajjar, Haryana.
Hiring women automobile engineers is a relatively recent phenomenon in India and even in the global auto hubs of the US and Europe, factory floors still remain male bastions. General Motors, Chrysler and Ford Motors, do have female auto engineers in senior management positions, but they are outnumbered by men.