Gendering STEMM in India

As more Indians enter higher education than ever before, the middle class strategizes to channel its progeny into professional education. Of the professional courses, there is, as one scholar says, a "social fever" around engineering and medicine. The contrast between engineering and medical education on gender representation is palpable, with men dominating engineering while women have a slight edge in medicine. The imbalances reflect gendered parental expectations and a gendering of disciplines: “men and machines” versus “care and compassion.” They also fit within a larger, ideal-typical imaginary of women’s place being in the home and men’s outside.

Middle-class parental aspirations and the social fever to enter prestigious courses of study are accompanied by their downsides. The intense competition in both settings exacerbates negative perceptions of caste-based affirmative action, resulting in egregious atrocities in medical colleges, while recurrent student suicides in elite engineering institutes allude to a cocktail of pressures brewing a mental health crisis. Gender-based affirmative action in elite engineering colleges, while disrupting male dominance, is resulting in an impostor experience among high-performing women. The Indian case raises important, globally resonant questions about gender, representation, and the professional workforce of the future.

Presenter: Ravinder Kaur, PhD; Emerita Professor, Humanities & Social Sciences Department, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India