The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have made the road to gender equality rockier than before. Reports have documented that the economic blow of the public health emergency has fallen disproportionately hard on women — men had more job security, and could negotiate higher wages, compared to women during the crisis years. Now the All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE) for 2020-21 has revealed that crucial gains made in closing the gender gap in undergraduate programmes suffered a setback during the pandemic. In classrooms where men were already in majority — computer science, business administration, pharmacy, technology and law courses, for instance — the number of women has gone down further. And in fields of study where the gender gap had, by and large, been plugged — medicine and commerce — the reverses are significant. The gender ratio in the B.Com course is down to 2016 levels.
Cultural notions about careers appropriate for women have traditionally held back their mobility. However, the spurt in aspirations in recent years exercised a steady influence on the gender composition of classrooms. In 2014, for instance, for every 100 male students enrolled in undergraduate commerce programmes, there were 90 female students. This gap was plugged in 2019. In MBBS and B.Sc programmes, the skew was addressed a year earlier. The Covid-related setback to gender equality in college and university classrooms is in contrast to developments in school education. The ASER report, released two weeks ago, shows that exigencies of the pandemic have not diminished parents’ keenness to get their daughters enrolled in schools. However, in a society where women’s education still does not receive adequate importance and the burden of caring for the family falls disproportionately on them, the effect of the crisis on higher education is telling.
In the wake of the pandemic, the government was quick to respond to several welfare and equity-related issues. Relief packages under PMJDY and Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Rozgar Abhiyaan — ASHA workers were brought under this package — were announced within days of the lockdown. The SVANIDHI scheme was launched for street vendors, a large percentage of whom are women. But the skew in classrooms threatens grim implications for women’s empowerment, which, in turn, could have a bearing on the nutrition, health and education of future generations. The Centre, state governments and educational institutions must find ways to enable women to return to institutions of higher education. In the short term, this could mean increasing the outlay for scholarships and creating more dorms and hostels. In the long run, this should mean catalysing processes of social change that enable half of the country’s population to attain its aspirations.
