Opinion To remedy gender imbalance in IITs, encourage girls to engage with STEM early in their academic journey

In 2018, when the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) introduced a supernumerary quota for women in undergraduate engineering courses — allocating extra seats instead of carving them out from existing numbers — it was a necessary course correction to remedy decades of gender imbalance, especially across some of the older centres. The policy worked as intended, pushing up female enrolment between 19 and 21 per cent across campuses. But, according to Joint Implementation Committee data shared by the JEE Advanced examination organising institutes, despite the absolute numbers of women admitted having gone up due to the quota — from 16,053 seats in 2020 to 18,168 in 2025 — the proportion of women students has flattened at around 20 per cent of total admissions. Simply put, the policy has succeeded in halting the decline, but it has not moved the needle far enough towards greater inclusivity.

Behind these statistics lies a more complicated truth: Access does not automatically translate into belonging. The IITs, to their credit, recognise this. To stop the proverbial glass ceiling from capping ambitions, campuses have been moving towards structural and cultural change — better hostels, safe and equitable recreational spaces, improved washroom facilities, access to AI-driven mental health tools, peer-support groups, stress-management workshops, and even institutional innovations such as IIT Kharagpur’s creation of the post of a dean of well-being, focused especially on student care, and to tackle obstacles female students face in environments long shaped by a male-majority ethos.

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Yet, this is merely the groundwork. The next step must be about changing the culture that shapes female students even before they arrive at IITs. That means reforming school pedagogy to challenge gendered assumptions about aptitude; hosting workshops that address unconscious bias; creating curricula that foreground the achievements of women scientists, and encouraging girls who tinker, question and solve at every step of their academic journey. Government initiatives such as the Vigyan Jyoti programme and the CBSE’s UDAAN scheme, which provide financial assistance, mentoring and exposure to IITs, IISERs, and CSIR labs for girls in Classes IX–XII, are important correctives, but their impact is still unevenly felt. Despite the parity achieved in certain STEM fields such as medicine, where female students have begun to outnumber men, barriers to aspiration continue to surface persistently, funnelling women away from technical fields. And yet, many of India’s most ambitious scientific enterprises, including ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission and Chandrayaan-2, are now helmed by women, offering proof that the glass ceiling is not immutable. And that change is possible once women learn to see themselves as part of this continuum, when they can walk into institutions like the IITs knowing they belong, not as outliers rewriting the rules, but as rightful heirs to a legacy that includes them unselfconsciously.