Gender equality still eludes science education and research

The sciences may be regarded as being mostly egalitarian, but a new study has discovered that the significant under-representation of women in the various fields of science has not changed over the years.

Among the institutions with the largest gender disparities are several Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

The study, which is due to be published in the journal Current Sciences in September, attempts to provide an accounting in an area which has largely not been studied before, explained Dr Tuli Dey, an assistant professor at the Institute of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, Savitribai Phule Pune University.

The numbers are discomfiting. For example, within the most prominent engineering colleges in the country, the IITs, the average female faculty amounts to only 11.24%.

Dr Dey told DH that a lack of information about women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) also shows that the matter has not been properly studied before.

“We don’t have enough records [but this highlights] the point that we know about the discrimination but don’t have the statistics at the Indian scenario to understand its depth and distribution. It is not quantifiable at this moment,” she said.

The situation among the top 20 universities in the country appears to be a little better with the data showing that the average female faculty number increases to 27.11%.

The researchers, who also include PhD student Akanksha Swarup, said this “can be probably explained by the fact that these universities handle teaching and research mostly related to basic science rather than the technical subjects.”

A closer examination of the data, however, reveals some institutes have better gender equality than others. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has 45.8% women faculty. But the worst for gender equality is the IISc where female faculty members comprise only 8.6%.

The IISc could not respond about new faculty recruitment by the time of publication.

CSIR imbalance

Meantime, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has 4,600 active scientists, of which only 18.48% are women. The distribution of gender in Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) throughout India is 15.47% female and 84.52% male, which is comparable to IITs and NITs.

“I am not seeing any remedy in the near future as the current absorption of female candidates is approx 20-30% nationally, which will carry over the next 25-30 academic years,” Dr Dey said.

At the National Institutes of Technologies (NITs), female faculty make up an average of 17.75% of staff with NIT Uttarakhand having the lowest (6.67%) and NIT Manipur the highest percentage (29.41%).