On January 8, XLRI Jamshedpur held Xavier Aptitude Test (XAT), to begin its admission process for its Business Management and Human Resource Management (HRM) programmes for 2017. The prestigious institute is predominantly known for its HRM course. Going by the age-old belief that Human Resource is a woman’s game as they are supposedly endowed with more soft skills than men, PaGaLGuY conducted a poll to find out if students comply with this point of view.

Out of the 211 who participated in the poll (at the time of writing), only 46 complied with the belief while the remaining 165 students begged to differ. Agreeing to the poll results and disagreeing with the age-old belief, Rushikesh Kulkarni, who is pursuing MA in Human Resource Management and Labour Relations at Tata Institute of Social Sciences said, “To stereotype women as being ‘more endowed with soft skills and thus a better fit for HR ‘ would be quite wrong on many counts. The profession of HR has been misunderstood and with the contours of business changing, the nature of HR is also undergoing a shift.” He further added that in the current economic context, the profession offers some exciting challenges and opportunities. “Whether it is ensuring your organisation is agile enough to adapt and change to the volatile environment; working with blue collar workers and their unions to ensure fair and just labour practices and policies, or making sure that a safe working environment exists for every employee, are all looked into by an HR professional,” he said.

XLRI Jamshedpur HRM student, Achyut Gupta, said that all toppers of their batch are men, which goes to say a lot about how the trend is changing.

Himanshu Shankar, who is awaiting his XAT scores, also plans to pursue HRM from XLRI, “I’m not denying there’s a reason HR is dominated by women. In the past, that was the case. But times have changed today and so has the job description. While men have soft skills too, today, the job description of an HR manager goes far beyond than just having ‘soft skills’. It’s got plenty more to do – analyzing the performance of the company vis-a-vis that of the market, handling balance sheets etc, which men can surely do,” he said.