In India, the story of women and girls in science is organized around the dissonance between expanding pipelines and stubborn obstacles. Put another way, the country is getting better at getting girls and young women into STEM education, but far less consistently at converting those aspirations into long careers in science work. Why?
According to the All India Higher Education Survey 2021-22, women account for 43% of higher education enrollments in STEM fields. Recent reports from Gujarat also indicate a surge in the number of women seeking jobs in engineering and construction, long coded male fields in Indian professional culture. On the other hand, a response in Parliament based on the 2023 R&D Statistical Report stated that women in STEM accounted for only 18.6% of the total workforce in 2021.
We know that institutions are paying attention because their messages encouraging girls to choose science are increasingly accompanied by messages to transform institutions so that women can stay and advance. The GATI (Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions) project of the Ministry of Science and Technology (Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions), for example, puts gender equality as a reform agenda. The policy language is also increasingly clear about allowing women to “take a career break” and re-enter the scientific workforce. The Ministry of Science and Technology’s WISE-KIRAN effort targeted women who had left and wanted to return to research work.
The existence of such schemes also reveals assumptions in many scientific workplaces that the better scientist is one who is 24/7, geographically mobile, and free from the responsibility of caring for their families. Caregiving remains heavily feminized in India and childcare infrastructure is uneven, so these assumptions represent a de facto sorting mechanism. And while they are obviously exclusionary, people in labs often rationalize them as a meritocracy at work.
Lived experiences
This story of metaphorical pipelines and barriers would also be incomplete if it remained only abstractly about gender. In India, people are gendered through caste, class, region, language, religion, disability and sexuality. If the question is why a young person with scientific talent quits science, the answer is often that multiple structures are selecting against them at once. A woman from a so-called “upper caste” metropolitan college 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 approach to mentorships, internships, conferences, referrals, labs, and sponsorship often diverges long before they face their first interview or submit a grant application.
Like other elite professions, Indian science has long drawn its authority from institutions that say who can enter and who can belong. Even when students from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBC communities enter STEM programmes, they encounter forms of exclusion that are difficult to capture in official language, from being treated as beneficiaries rather than peers to feeling that they bear a persistent burden of proof. And this leads to fewer individuals continuing in science, and as a result, which questions and efforts are allowed to revitalize the scientific enterprise.
In the same vein, the typical scientific workplace tends to adopt identities it deems legible—including bodies that do not create “administrative complications.” For trans scientists, the barriers start at the paperwork level and then spill over into everything else, as the plight of Beonca Laishram illustrated last year. Trans people still struggle to update their records, are expected to explain discrepancies between publications and identities, face invasive scrutiny in facilities such as dormitories and restrooms, and are expected to endure workplace cultures that view harassment as an interpersonal “drama” rather than an institutional failure. It’s cruel that a single hostile department can halt a career and a single humiliating incident can make a workplace feel permanently unsafe.
STEM Work Safety
These issues cannot be separated from the broader labor issue. Even if women earn STEM degrees, the economy they graduate from will not reliably 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 stability of women’s work, particularly the extent to which participation reflects secure jobs rather than the low-paid work women were forced to accept in times of need. In STEM, the question is whether India is creating enough R&D and technical services jobs to match the expansion in education. Precarious contracts or informal recruitment practices can also exacerbate the discrimination faced by so-called lower caste and trans graduates as they have fewer protections.
Certainly, safety and dignity are essential in STEM work. No fieldwork, night shifts in hospitals, late hours in labs, traveling to conferences and commuting across cities are not gender neutral experiences. During any of these, women face harassment and institutional indifference. Without even systemic support, how much women can progress becomes a question of how much they can last – which is deeply undesirable. There is yet another gradation: A Dalit woman in the field may face vulnerabilities that her peers do not, just as a trans person traveling to a workshop may have to weigh professional benefits against the risk of violence or humiliation.
And while women remain in science, they are often not recognized in time. Global discussions on the gender gap in science have repeatedly noted that women remain underrepresented in senior authorship (research papers) and leadership roles even after grassroots participation has increased. According to UNESCO, women make up less than 30% of top leadership positions in higher education and research institutions worldwide.
Scholarships and targeted funding are most effective when they get more people in and then help them stay. For example, the IIT-Bombay WINGS scholarship initiative uses financial support to prevent women from leaving the pipeline. However, there is a risk here that India ends up with islands of excellence as a result.
The need for accountability
The reason for inclusion in the name of justice is well worked out and known. However, STEM is also concerned with the quality of knowledge. There is no reason why diversity, including gender, should not produce better science, but crucially, it can also broaden the range of questions that the scientific enterprise considers legitimate and societal problems that it considers appropriate to address. The importance of this point cannot be overstated. India’s scientific agendas often intersect with public health, climate risks, water stress, agrarian livelihoods and digital governance, with practical implications.
A research system that systematically filters out women, and more so women from marginalized castes and/or rural settings and from non-metropolitan institutions, will also filter out lived knowledge of how technologies exist in the real world. The same is true for trans people and other gender minorities, who are often the first witnesses to how supposedly neutral technologies can reproduce discrimination.
If senior scientists use surveillance, informal networks, documentation, housing, travel norms, conference culture, and workplace humor to implement their biases and exclusionary ideas, metrics alone will not solve them. More specifically, representation at entry points does not automatically induce retention; detention will not automatically create authority; and authority does not automatically produce institutional change. For any of this to happen, accountability needs to be built into the system.
Reason and intention
Deliberative democracy depends on institutions that can absorb contests and transform them into legitimate public decisions by means other than majoritarianism or technocratic fiat. In science, contests are also inevitable and, if properly institutionalized, healthy: how India should regulate air quality, vaccine awareness, AI in welfare, gene editing, climate adaptation or nuclear power is not just about scientific facts: it is also about distributive justice and moral rectitude.
Inclusive science automatically strengthens deliberative democracy because it expands who can credibly participate in these arguments as experts and witnesses rather than as passive recipients of policy. And when women are present throughout the scientific hierarchy—as young students, as principal investigators, and as scientists—they can help define what counts as a problem, what counts as a solution, and what counts as an acceptable compromise. The same is true when scientists from marginalized castes and trans scientists can participate without being reduced to symbols.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
Published – 11 Feb 2026 06:00 IST