1/3rd Indian STEM Conferences have Low Female Participation

By: WE Staff | Wednesday, 15 November 2023

According to reports, only men speakers have participated in 35 per cent of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) conferences held in India over the last three years. In India, there are more male researchers than female researchers in STEM fields, but the underrepresentation of female researchers is particularly noticeable at the respective conferences.

June 2020 till December 2021 was the period when volunteers were recruited by neuroscientist Shruti Muralidhar, based in Toronto, Canada, and cell biologist Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, to search through publicly accessible data from Indian university websites. They discovered that, across 98 Indian universities and institutes, women make up just 16.7 per cent of the STEM faculty on average. With 22.5 per cent of the total, biology had the highest participation of women, while engineering had the lowest, with only 8.3 per cent. In contrast, a 2019 study discovered that between 33 per cent and 54 per cent of the faculty members in the public health departments of the top 15 special science and public health universities in the world are women. These universities are located in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

In the elite universities and institutions of India, this gender gap is prominently visible. With a median of about 10 per cent, the eight top-ranked universities in the Indian National Institutional Research Framework 2022 rankings had a lower percentage of female faculty members than average.

According to a representative of the highly regarded Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India, the reasons for this underrepresentation are multifaceted. They also mentioned the efforts made by the Institute to inspire women to pursue their careers in research. "TIFR has gender-neutral hiring practices and evaluation procedures for scientists and academicians," the organization stated.