| | AUGUST 20219versity, especially at the higher levels. The AISHE 2019 Report shows that while females form 42 percent of the total faculty members at Universities and colleges in India, only 27 percent of the Professors (the highest cadre) are women. Obviously the proportion of female Directors, Principals, Deans and Vice Chancellors is in single digits.Changing mind-sets is a long- drawn affair, but cre-ating the right environment would help students see, understand, accept and embrace diversity. Universities can learn from some of the good corporate practices to improve the workplace for teaching and non- teach-ing staff. In order to create live examples for students to see and appreciate diversity Universities can do the following:· Recognize capabilities and give women employees opportunities to participate in decision-making· Create a fast track leadership development pro-gramme to enable women to accelerate their prog-ress to senior levels with focused mentoring, specific training and flexible schedules to match their needs at different life-stages: child-care early on in their careers and care of the elderly later on in their careers.· Offer day care facilities to women who return to work after maternity leave. The Symbiosis Internation-al University for instance, offers day care facilities in the city centre in Pune, to support young mothers to re-turn to work. This results in a large number of women returning to work rather than quitting· Provide the disabled with accessories and tools to increase their access ­ e.g. software for the visually im-paired, facilities to enable greater physical accessibility and ensuring equal opportunities.· Adopting an honest and fair, merit-based selection system for senior positionsIt is critical that these initiatives should be wide-spread and not exceptions. As per UNESCO, "Inclusion is seen as a process of addressing and responding to the diversity of needs of all learners through increasing participation in learning, cultures and communities, and reducing exclusion within and from education."Specifically, to encourage female girl students and ensure respect for gender diversity among students, Universities can ­· Ensure that they practice what they preach - have a healthy gender diversity in the teaching and non- teaching staff, at all levels. · Offer scholarships to meritorious girl students· Create hostels for girls and ensure safe transport systems,· Create student committees with equal representa-tion for men and women to enable girls to take equal responsibilities and grow.· Create awareness and sensitize students and soci-ety towards inclusion of the LGBTQ community.· Create awareness about United Nations inclusion principles and pledges and involve students in under-taking Organizational audits to map the targets. This can be a creative way of helping Universities to mea-sure their actual achievements.· Create a buy-in for diversity and inclusion among students and emphasize that these are `not just good to have', but an imperative in the world today.· Teach students the value of Collaborative dis-tributed models, where teams in different parts of the world work together in harmony, to develop solutions, highlighting the fact that diversity of talent is the key to success.· Universities must make special efforts to identi-fy talent-gaps and train girls for in-demand futuristic skills, since preparing them for the workforce is equal-ly important. Research shows that the jobs that are like-ly to be lost to structural changes in the labour mar-kets, are low-skill and repetitive jobs and the ones that will see a rising demand are jobs in AI, data analytics, cloud computing, digital transformations and there is a dearth of women in these domains. e.g. there are only 12 percent women in cloud computing; women should be encouraged to take up such subjects.The large responsibility to be the thought-leaders in embedding the values of diversity and inclusion in students and in society, can be achieved by those Uni-versities which incorporate these tenets in their own functioning. UNIVERSITIES CAN LEARN FROM SOME OF THE GOOD CORPORATE PRACTICES TO IMPROVE THE WORKPLACE FOR TEACHING AND NON- TEACHING STAFF
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