Engineering gender equity: A quota for women in IITs is unlikely to work

The diktat of the ministry of human resource development to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to ensure that at least 14 per cent of their seats go to women in the session starting July 2018, rising to 20 per cent by 2020, is imbued with the best of intentions. But, as a solution for ensuring gender equity in higher engineering education, it is flawed. This is not to deny the skewed gender ratio in engineering courses, in general, and the IITs, in particular. The world over, engineering, like economics, has traditionally been a “guy thing” and India is no exception. In the United States, for example, 20 per cent of engineering school graduates are women. India is, in fact, ahead here, with women accounting for 28 per cent of the applicants for the Joint Entrance Examination last year. Drilled down to the prestigious IITs, the numbers certainly reflect poorly on their concern for gender equity — ranging from 6.5 per cent in IIT Kanpur to 14.7 per cent in IIT Mandi. 

So, in that sense, the plan to add at least 550 “supernumerary” seats, admissions for which will begin once the existing seats are filled up, appears to address an implicit gender bias. The complexity this exercise involves in aligning this quota (which kicks in after accounting for women who gain admission on the merit list) with the existing 49.5 per cent quota for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes is but one dimension of the issue. 

The bigger doubt is whether this “quota system” will further the cause of female engineers in any meaningful way. Women admitted via this route will have to cope, for one thing, with the visceral resentment general category students harbour against “quota” students — a fact that is unlikely to enhance women’s reputation in competing on a level playing field. Women students are unlikely to appreciate this — just as much as senior women executives did not appreciate the directive of the ministry of corporate affairs to reserve one board position for women. At this level, women believe themselves to be perfectly competent to compete with men on their own terms. 

Second, even though increasing the proportion of female students in some of the world's most prestigious engineering institutes may earn the government brownie points for positive social engineering, yet it will not address the bigger issue of societal norms that impact aspiring women engineers. This begins at the graduate-application stage. One indicator: a dipstick survey by IIT Mandi showed that a smaller percentage of women who qualified actually joined the IITs. In 2016, for instance, 2,200 female candidates ranked above the IIT cut-off, but only 38 per cent of them joined against 68 per cent for men. A good part of the reason, investigation revealed, was that female candidates’ choices were constrained by parental and societal restrictions (such as being pressured to choosing an institution close to home and so on). The second aspect of the issue lies at the other end of the value chain: in the companies that hire engineers. That most companies are loath to hire women engineering graduates is a self-evident truth; incredibly, this gender bias is alive and kicking in the technology world as well, which is known to hire more women than the traditional engineering disciplines. 

The Indian technology industry has just 26 per cent of women in engineering roles and more than half of them quit tech to switch to roles such as marketing, consulting or product management. The glass ceiling here is easy to spot: male engineers move into managerial positions after six-plus years compared with eight-plus years for women. When the “forward linkages” for female engineers are so weak, will a backward linkage such as an expensive IIT education make a significant difference?