BridgeLabz Solutions LLP, one of India’s largest IP-driven incubation labs aimed at nurturing engineering talent and ideas in the emerging technology space, recently conducted a survey to compare the problems faced by women and men while looking for a job. The survey was conducted on 2300+ participants from cities across India, constituting engineers who graduated in 2019 or earlier, of which 58% were male and 42% were female. The participants were mainly from Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Mumbai, as well as cities such as Delhi, Coimbatore, Chennai, Kolkata, Jaipur, and Aurangabad, amongst others.

The findings of the survey revealed that a majority of women participants face challenges in landing tech jobs due to a lack of hands-on experience for coding (40%) and are low on confidence (33%), while these figures stood at 38% and 31% for men.

Amongst the participants, fewer women (27%) than men (31%) stated that they aren’t well versed with the emerging tech platforms and languages which are required to crack the interviews and tests. This is indicative of the fact that more women than men have the knowledge but still lack the practical experience needed to execute it.

This was further corroborated by the findings of BridgeLabz’s Coding Café test conducted on over 100K+ engineers from 17 cities pan-India. Here, with women securing 4%+ higher than the men’s scores, it was revealed that they have a better coding quotient than men, but require a platform for support in order to boost their confidence and practical skills.

Narayan Mahadevan, Founder, BridgeLabz said, “The root cause of the challenges amongst engineering talent while trying to secure a job is that the engineering syllabus across traditional institutions is most often theory-oriented and/or outdated. Additionally, even if they introduce emerging technologies as per syllabus, the major solution lies in revamping the syllabus as per industry requirements, in a manner that makes it dynamic with the changing tech trends. Our findings have revealed that women, in particular, are equipped with the right knowledge for the field, but are in need of more exposure to the practical side of things in order to hone their abilities.”

He added, “Experiential learning is the key to unlocking the true potential of engineering talent in our country, not only in making them employable but to convert them into active contributors from day one on the job. This has been our constant endeavour at BridgeLabz and, with the findings of our surveys, we hope to encourage other stakeholders in the ecosystem to introduce similar formats centred on practical exposure.”