Ericsson India to hire more women

Ericsson is aggressively hiring more women for its core operations – a job typically reserved for males.

The company's India unit is set to hire around 100 woman engineers this year, double that of last year. The company has recognized gender diversity as an important component of its structure. This is expected to increase the woman count in the company to around 15%. Currently, women form around 10% of its 2,100 workforce.

"The woman engineers in Ericsson India will for the first time be involved in mainline consulting and systems integration, 3G and 4G network rollouts, network design and optimization, besides closely working with Ericsson's managed services business teams", Sameer Khanna, its Vice President and HR head told ET.

He said the company would soon employ around 20 female officers from the central armed forces to deliver field operations support functions, including network rollout and deployment, resource allocation and logistics management.

Amid the organizational transformation, "the ICT part has got bigger, the operations processes have become more evolved and systems more specialised in Ericsson, which led us to hire more woman engineers, with the requisite technical skills, to fill in diverse managerial roles, including customer facing roles, in core operations," said Khanna.

"These roles are highly technical and the ladies have shown very good results, especially by developing new tools for the company in the key area of network optimisation," Khanna said.

The company is also sensitizing managers across its India unit on gender diversity another company executive said.

Image credit: Indiatimes