PwC India has announced that it plans to increase its gender diversity to at least 40 percent in the coming years, as per news reports.

As part of its latest strategy ‘New Equation’, the company plans to increase its campus recruitment drives by five times and increase the representation of women in the company’s workforce.

PwC has joined a list of companies that have recently turned to diversity at the entry-level. Other companies include Amazon India, PayPal, Capgemini, to name a few.

Avtar, which has been in the DEI space for two decades now, has devised strategies to increase women’s representation in the workforce. Avtar has also been highlighting the need to work on DEI goals with renewed vigor as the pandemic has affected women disproportionately.

Focusing on a robust entry-level pool of women rings in a sustainable DEI goal. It also offers the solution to the issue of less representation of women at the higher levels of career– as suggested by Sheryl Sandberg, founder of LeanIn.org. She has elaborated on the thin female executive pipeline in her book, Lean In Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, co-authored by Nell Scovell.

The Best Companies for Women in India (BCWI),  a gender analytics exercise by Avtar in association with Working Mother, illustrates how companies can weave diversity policies with a combination of professional and personal incentives for women employers. While diversity at an entry-level is a good start,  programs to enable career progression like career sponsorship, mentoring, and leadership training, alongside those that help women traverse the path of marriage and aid in the maternity continuum– the two stages that derail women’s careers.