More girls taking CAT, but fewer making it to IIM-A, says survey

Updated on: Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Detailed analysis of students getting into the country’s top B-school, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) shows that although more and more girls are taking the Common Admission Test (CAT), not many are making it to the final list.

The number of girls in IIMA’s flagship course, Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGP), is dipping since the last three years.

While the number of girls who got admissions in PGP dropped from 16% in 2009 to 11% in 2010, this year it stands at 10.9 per cent.

Alumnus of IIM-A from the PGP batch of 2004 Vivek Tuteja, who runs a prominent coaching class for CAT aspirants in various cities, said that the reason for less number of female candidates making it to IIM-A could be because of the consideration of work experience of candidates by the institute and the online CAT.

Tuteja said, “This can be attributed to two factors. First, profiling by B-schools and work experience is also becoming an important criteria and number of female applicants with work experience is less as generally women are more stable at work and less likely to change once they start working. Secondly, if we compare this with other B-schools where the exam is not conducted online, selection of female candidates is not seen to be declining there. So there may be a case of problem in accessing IT facilities for girl students leading to a situation wherein they are not adept at tackling the online tests.”

The drop in the figure has occurred despite an increase in the number of female candidates taking CAT. While there were 19.56% girls among the CAT candidates in 2008, the figure was 26% in both 2009 and 2010.

In 2009, a total of 817 students were given interview calls of which 99 were girls. Of these, 52.5% got admission offers. While this success rate improved to 55.8% in 2010, it declined to 45% this year.

Out of 91 girls who got interview calls, only 41 girls got admission calls this year.

More girls taking CAT, but fewer making it to IIM-A, says survey

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