Article Title: The mystery of the missing IIT girls

Article Summary

In the article at hand, the author comments on the worrying trend of a male monopoly in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and tries to cull perspectives on why the same is occurring. The author starts by providing a snapshot of successful joint entrance (JEE) rankers from this academic year, and points out the obvious lack of female presence in the photograph. She then highlights some dismal statistics, about female rankers in the JEE exams. The numbers are not nearly close to male performances. The issue stems from even before the exams are held, argues the author. It starts in coaching institutes. The number of females there are also very less compared to males, and the reasons are as diverse as they are toxic – parents do not want to spend on girls’ education, and they fear risks to girls’ health and wellbeing as they think she might be attacked when away from home. The situation of gender-exclusivity is so bad at the IITs that educational bodies have had to reserve seats for females, and that is now giving female representation at the institutes a manufactured push. Some people the author interviewed have identified the cause of this gender disparity as being rooted in the entrance exams alone and not in the coursework at IITs, as girls take up engineering elsewhere too and they outperform boys at IIT classes. However, all parties agree that this issue must be fixed – if girls are left out of technical education, not only them, but anybody trying to make a change in the world through tech loses out, as they are missing the potential of a whole half of the population from the table.