Is Indian Higher Education Experiencing a Quiet Female Revolution?

The following is a guest post by P. Pushkar, a former lecturer in international development studies at McGill University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history at St. Stephen’s College in India.
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A quiet revolution may be underway in India’s higher-education system. Making headlines are issues such as India’s need to build thousands of new universities and colleges, faculty and skills shortages, reforms to improve the quality of education, and legislation to permit the entry of Western universities.

What is not making big news is that female students now outnumber men at some elite Indian institutions and this change may even accelerate. This is hardly a new trend in the West, but it’s significant for India for several reasons.

India is one of the few countries in the world where, due to rampant sex selection and cultural factors, men outnumber women. Girls are commonly discriminated against in subtle and crude ways from the time they are born.

The growing presence of women in colleges and universities, therefore, is a great leap forward. It is to the credit of young women that more of them are gaining entry into some of the most competitive higher-education institutions without the fuss of gender quotas.

The increased female enrollment at postsecondary institutions has not been well received in some quarters. Earlier this year, Valson Thampu, the principal of Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College--probably India’s most prestigious and “liberal” of liberal-arts institutions--put forward a proposal to reserve 40 percent of seats for men. Currently, 64 percent of the student population there is women, according to The Times of India.

Unlike other colleges which admit students on the basis of high-school grades alone, St. Stephen’s short-lists high-performing students for interviews before admitting a select few. In theory, college administrators can discriminate against girls. However, girls have outperformed boys in school-finishing exams for many years now. This has probably tied the hands of college authorities. They can do little when a majority of applicants with 90 percent marks or more are girls.

Predictably, Principal Thampu’s proposal created a firestorm inside and outside the college. For now, it seems the idea has been shelved.

The good news gets better for girls. During the 1980s, women were largely enrolled in the humanities and select social-science programs. Then, more of them started taking up male-dominated disciplines, such as economics. Today, for example, the majority of economics students—reported to be 70 percent—at St. Stephen’s are women.

The change is a huge step in symbolic terms. Some of India’s most influential economists studied at St. Stephen’s, including Kaushik Basu, a Cornell University professor and currently the chief economic adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

In the sciences, at St. Stephen’s and elsewhere, women had already made inroads into disciplines like biology and chemistry. Physics remains the last stronghold of men.

Change is coming to other places as well, albeit slowly. Women remain scarce at the best engineering and business schools such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management.

This year, however, there was a big surge in the number of women applicants at such prestigious institutions. A record number of female students took the IIT entrance exams. This increase has been attributed to reduction in application fees to Rs. 200 (approximately $4) and their elimination for online applications.

It would be premature to exaggerate the advances made by India’s women. At best, it appears that the current situation represents the first stage of a revolution. The cause may get a boost if the Indian government decides that the IITs must look at high-school grades as part of admissions, instead of relying solely on a common entrance exam.

What’s more, there are reports that India’s growing private sector are keen to introduce more gender diversity in the workplace. However, they are struggling to find qualified women with business and engineering degrees.

If this is true, the demand for women with business or engineering degrees may also stimulate changes in how India’s engineering and business schools admit students.

For now, at least, St. Stephen’s appears to have been well and truly conquered by this revolution and others may follow.

[Creative Commons licensed Wikimedia image by Arjuna Rao Chavala]