Let us be direct: most diversity initiatives in Indian IT fail because they treat diversity as a metric to report rather than a capability to build. Companies set numerical targets, run a few campus drives at women’s engineering colleges, publish a LinkedIn post on International Women’s Day, and then wonder why their engineering teams still look the same.
Building a genuinely diverse engineering team requires systemic changes to how you source, screen, hire, and retain talent. It is harder than checking a box, but the evidence is overwhelming — diverse teams build better products, make better decisions, and outperform homogeneous teams on every meaningful metric.
The Business Case (Because You Will Need to Sell This Internally)
If you are an engineering leader trying to get executive buy-in for diversity investment, here are the numbers:
- McKinsey’s 2023 research found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 39 percent more likely to outperform their peers financially
- Harvard Business Review reported that diverse teams are 70 percent more likely to capture new markets
- Boston Consulting Group found that companies with above-average management diversity report innovation revenue 19 percentage points higher than companies with below-average diversity
In the Indian context specifically, diverse engineering teams better understand the needs of a user base that spans languages, economic segments, accessibility requirements, and cultural contexts. A team of engineers who all look the same, think the same, and come from the same five engineering colleges will have massive blind spots.
Where Most Companies Go Wrong
1. The Pipeline Problem Is a Sourcing Problem
“We would love to hire more women and underrepresented candidates, but they just do not apply.” This is the most common excuse, and it is backwards. Candidates from underrepresented groups do not apply because your sourcing channels, job descriptions, and employer brand are not reaching or attracting them.
If your sourcing strategy is limited to LinkedIn recruiter searches and referrals from your existing (homogeneous) team, you will keep getting the same candidate profiles. Referral networks are inherently homogeneous — people refer people who look and think like them.
2. Biased Job Descriptions
Research by Textio and others has shown that job descriptions containing masculine-coded language (“aggressive,” “dominant,” “rock star,” “ninja”) receive significantly fewer applications from women. Similarly, inflated requirement lists disproportionately discourage women and minorities from applying, since these groups tend to apply only when they meet nearly all listed qualifications.
3. Unstructured Interviews Amplify Bias
When interviewers rely on gut feeling and unstructured conversation, bias runs unchecked. “Culture fit” becomes code for “people I would enjoy having a beer with,” which is how homogeneous teams self-replicate. (For a more productive approach to cultural fit hiring, see our dedicated guide.)
4. Retention Failures
Hiring diverse candidates into a non-inclusive environment is worse than not hiring them at all. High attrition among underrepresented groups — due to microaggressions, lack of belonging, absent mentorship, and biased performance reviews — damages your employer brand in those communities and makes future hiring harder.
A Practical Framework for Inclusive Hiring
Step 1: Rewrite Your Job Descriptions
- Use gender-neutral language. Tools like Textio can scan and flag biased language automatically
- Limit “required” qualifications to genuine must-haves (5-7 maximum)
- Include salary ranges — pay transparency disproportionately benefits underrepresented groups who are less likely to negotiate aggressively
- State your commitment to diversity explicitly, but with specifics (what you actually do), not vague platitudes
- Remove unnecessary degree requirements — “Bachelor’s in Computer Science from a Tier 1 college” eliminates talent from non-traditional backgrounds who are fully capable of doing the job
Step 2: Diversify Your Sourcing Channels
Go beyond LinkedIn and employee referrals:
- Women-focused tech communities: WomenWhoCode, SheThePeople, Girls Who Code alumni networks, AnitaB.org India chapter
- Regional engineering colleges: Talent outside the IIT/NIT/BITS bubble is abundant, motivated, and often overlooked
- Bootcamp graduates: Programs like Masai School, Newton School, and Scaler attract career switchers from diverse backgrounds
- Returnship programs: Women re-entering the workforce after career breaks are an undertapped talent pool with significant experience
- Disability-inclusive job boards: platforms like Enable India and Disability Rights India Foundation connect employers with qualified candidates with disabilities
- LGBTQ+ networks: Pride Circle and other organisations maintain talent databases of LGBTQ+ professionals
Our niche recruitment team actively sources from these channels and can help you access candidate pools your internal team may not reach.
Step 3: Implement Structured, Bias-Reduced Screening
Blind resume screening. Remove names, photos, college names, and graduation years from resumes before the first review. Evaluate purely on skills, experience, and demonstrated impact. Several ATS platforms support automated anonymisation.
Standardised interview scorecards. Every interviewer evaluates every candidate on the same predefined criteria using the same rubric. Scores are submitted independently before any group discussion. This eliminates anchoring bias and groupthink.
Diverse interview panels. Ensure at least one interviewer from an underrepresented group is on every panel. This signals inclusion to candidates and introduces different perspectives into evaluation.
Practical assessments over pedigree. Replace degree requirements and brand-name employer bias with work-sample tests, portfolio reviews, or take-home assignments that measure actual ability.
Step 4: Fix Your Retention Before Scaling Hiring
There is no point hiring diverse candidates if your environment pushes them out. Address retention first:
Inclusive onboarding. Assign onboarding buddies deliberately — pair new hires from underrepresented groups with allies who can help them navigate the social dynamics of the organisation.
Mentorship and sponsorship programs. Mentorship is advice. Sponsorship is advocacy — a senior leader who actively promotes a junior person’s career, puts them on high-visibility projects, and speaks for them in rooms they are not in. Sponsorship is what moves the needle.
Transparent promotion criteria. Publish your promotion framework. Define what “senior” means in terms of observable behaviours and outcomes. Opaque promotion processes disproportionately disadvantage people who lack informal access to decision-makers.
Psychological safety. Engineers from underrepresented groups need to feel safe asking questions, admitting mistakes, and pushing back on technical decisions without social penalty. This requires active modelling from leadership, not just a policy document.
Pay equity audits. Run compensation analysis by gender, background, and tenure annually. Fix disparities proactively. Nothing erodes trust faster than a diversity hire discovering they are paid less than peers for the same work.
Measuring Progress
Track these metrics quarterly:
- Applicant diversity — Percentage of applicants from underrepresented groups by role and level
- Pipeline conversion rates — Drop-off rates at each interview stage, broken down by demographic group. If women apply at the same rate but drop off at the technical round at 2x the rate of men, your assessment process may be biased
- Offer acceptance rates — Differences in acceptance rates may indicate compensation or culture perception gaps
- Retention rates — 6-month and 12-month retention broken down by demographic group
- Promotion rates — Time to promotion by demographic group. This is the ultimate test of whether your environment is truly inclusive
- Employee belonging scores — Regular anonymous surveys measuring psychological safety and sense of belonging
Getting Started
You do not need to implement everything at once. Start with three high-impact actions:
- Rewrite your top five open job descriptions using inclusive language guidelines
- Add two new sourcing channels that reach underrepresented talent pools
- Implement standardised interview scorecards for all technical interviews
These three changes alone will measurably improve the diversity of your candidate pipeline within one quarter. From there, build on what works.
If you need help accessing diverse talent pools or building inclusive hiring processes, our permanent staffing and bulk hiring teams have experience designing inclusive recruitment campaigns for clients across industries. Let us talk about what a more diverse engineering team looks like for your organisation.
Related Reading
- Why Cultural Fit Matters More Than Technical Skills — How to assess culture alignment without reinforcing bias
- The Campus Hiring Playbook: From College to Cubicle — Campus recruitment is one of the most effective levers for building diverse teams
- About StakTeck — Our commitment to inclusive hiring across every engagement
