siliconindia | | August 202119· Recognize capabilities and give women employees opportunities to participate in decision-making· Create a fast track leadership development programme to enable women to accelerate their progress to senior levels with focussed 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 International University for instance, offers day care facilities in the city centre in Pune, to support young mothers to return to work. This results in a large % 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 impaired, facilities to enable greater physical accessibility and ensuring equal opportunities.· Adopting an honest and fair, merit-based selection system for senior positions It is critical that these initiatives should be widespread 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 representation for men and women to enable girls to take equal responsibilities and grow.· Create awareness and sensitize students and society towards inclusion of the LGBTQ community.· Create awareness about United Nations inclusion principles and pledges and involve students in undertaking Organizational audits to map the targets. This can be a creative way of helping Universities to measure 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 distributed 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 identify talent-gaps and train girls for in-demand futuristic skills, since preparing them for the workforce is equally important. Research shows that the jobs that are likely to be lost to structural changes in the labour markets, 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% 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 Universities which incorporate these tenets in their own functioning. Changing mind-sets is a long- drawn affair, but creating the right environment would help students see, understand, accept and embrace diversity
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