In India, the story of women and girls in science is built around the mismatch between a widening pipeline and stubborn barriers. Put differently, the country is getting better at getting girls and young women into STEM education, but it has been less consistent at converting those aspirations into long careers in scientific work. Why?
According to the All India Survey on Higher Education 2021-22, 43% of higher education enrollments in STEM subjects are women. Recent reports from Gujarat have indicated a sharp rise in the number of women seeking seats in mechanical and civil engineering, which have long been masculine fields in Indian professional culture. On the other hand, a response in Parliament on the Research and Development Statistics Report 2023 said that female STEM researchers were only 18.6% of the total workforce in 2021.
We know institutions are paying attention because their messages of encouraging girls to choose science are increasingly growing, as well as their messages of driving change within institutions so that women can grow and thrive. For example, the Department of Science and Technology’s Project GATI (‘Gender Advancement to Transform Institutions’) offers gender equality as a reform agenda. Policy language is also becoming more explicit about allowing women to take “career breaks” and rejoin the scientific workforce. The WISE-KIRAN initiative of the Department of Science and Technology has targeted women who have moved away and want to get back into research work.
Again, the existence of such schemes also highlights assumptions in many scientific workplaces that the better scientist is one who is constantly available, geographically mobile, and free from the responsibility of caring for their families. In India, care work is overwhelmingly done by women and child care infrastructure is uneven, so these perceptions are similar In fact Sorting system. And while they are clearly ostracized, people inside labs often rationalize them as merits on the job.
lived experiences
This story of metaphorical pipelines and bottlenecks would also be incomplete if it remained only about gender in the abstract. In India people discriminate on the basis of caste, class, region, language, religion, disability and sexuality. If the question is why a young person with scientific talent leaves science, the answer is often about choosing several structures at once. A so-called “upper caste” metropolitan college woman and a woman from a marginalized caste in a small-town institution do not face the same friction, even if they have the same degree. Their access to mentorship, internships, conferences, recommendations, labs, and mentorship often varies long before they face their first interview or submit a grant application.
Like other elite professions, Indian science has long derived its authority from institutions that say who gets in and who belongs. Even when students from SC, ST and OBC communities enter STEM programs, they face exclusion that is difficult to understand in official language, being treated as a beneficiary rather than a peer, and being made to feel that the permanent burden of proof is on them. And this results in fewer people pursuing science and, as a consequence, what questions and interests are allowed to energize the scientific enterprise.
Similarly, the typical scientific workplace embraces identities it considers legible – including entities that do not create “administrative complications”. For trans scientists, barriers start at the paperwork level and then spread into everything else Beyoncé Laishram’s troubles Last year illustrated. Trans people still have difficulty updating records, are expected to explain mismatches between publications and identities, face aggressive scrutiny around facilities such as hostels and toilets, and are expected to tolerate workplace cultures that treat harassment as interpersonal ‘drama’ rather than institutional failure. Cruelly, a single hostile department move can derail a career and a single disrespectful incident can make a workplace feel permanently unsafe.
Safety in STEM Work
These issues cannot be separated from the broader labor question. Even when women get STEM degrees, the economy they graduate from doesn’t absorb them into secure jobs. India’s female labor force participation rate remains low by international standards, 31.7% in 2023-24. Public debates have also raised questions about the quality and sustainability of women’s work, particularly how this participation reflects secure jobs rather than the low-paid work that women were forced to do in times of crisis. In STEM, the question is whether India is creating enough positions in R&D and technical services to keep pace with educational expansion. Contracts with uncertainty or informal recruitment practices may also increase discrimination against so-called lower caste and trans graduates as they have fewer protections.
Certainly, safety and dignity are important in STEM work. Any of the fieldwork, night shifts in hospitals, working late in laboratories, traveling to conferences and traveling in cities is a gender-neutral experience. During any of them, women face harassment and institutional indifference. When there is not even systemic support, how much progress women can make becomes a question of how much they can endure – which is highly undesirable. Here’s another variation: a Dalit woman in the field may face vulnerabilities that her peers don’t, just as a trans person traveling for a workshop may have to weigh the risks of violence or humiliation as well as the professional benefits.
And even when women persist in the field of science, they often do not receive timely recognition. Global discussions of the gender gap in science have repeatedly noted that women remain under-represented as senior authors (on research papers) and in leadership roles, despite increased entry-level participation. According to UNESCO, less than 30% of top leadership roles in higher education and research institutions worldwide are women.
Scholarships and targeted funding are most effective when they allow more people to enter and then also help them stay. For example, the IIT-Bombay Wings scholarship initiative uses financial aid to prevent women from dropping out of the pipeline. However, the risk here is that India will be deprived of islands of excellence as a result.
need for accountability
The case for inclusion in the name of fairness is well known and well known. However, STEM is also concerned with the quality of knowledge. There is no reason why diversity, including gender, cannot produce better science, but importantly, it can also expand the range of questions that the scientific enterprise considers legitimate and the range of social problems it considers worth solving. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this point. India’s scientific agenda is often linked to public health, climate risks, water stress, agricultural livelihoods and digital governance, with practical consequences.
A research system that systematically filters out women, and especially women from marginalized castes and/or rural backgrounds and non-metropolitan institutions, will thus also filter out lived knowledge about how technologies exist in real settings. The same is true for trans people and other gender minorities, who are often early witnesses to how supposedly neutral technologies can reproduce discrimination.
If senior scientists use observation, informal networks, documentation, accommodation, travel norms, conference culture and workplace humor to understand their biases and exclusionary views, metrics alone will not solve them. More specifically, representation at points of entry will not automatically generate retention; Retention will not automatically give rise to rights; And authority will not automatically generate institutional change. For this to happen, accountability has to be built into the system.
reasoning and discussion
A deliberative democracy depends on institutions that can absorb contestations and convert them into legitimate public decisions by means other than majoritarianism or technocratic order. In science, competitions are also inevitable and, when appropriately institutionalized, healthy: whether India should regulate air quality, vaccine awareness, AI in welfare, gene editing, climate adaptation or nuclear energy is not just about scientific facts: it is also about distributive justice and moral purity.
An inclusive science automatically strengthens deliberative democracy because it expands who can credibly participate in these arguments as experts and witnesses rather than passive recipients of policy. And when women are present in the scientific hierarchy – as young students, as principal investigators, and as science administrators – they can help determine what counts as a problem, what counts as a solution, and what counts as an acceptable trade-off. The same is true when scientists from marginalized communities and trans scientists can participate without being transformed into symbols.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
published – February 11, 2026 06:00 am IST
