Of 17,695 new students in IIT campuses, 20% are girls this year

MUMBAI: The old Indian Institutes of Technology in the city, Delhi, Chennai and Kanpur have the best gender ratio among all the IIT campuses. This year, 3,480 girls joined various IITs, with 15 girls getting in through the gender-neutral pool of seats.

Of the 17,695 students admitted to the 23 IITs, females make up 19.75%. Last year, of the 17,340 admits given out by the IITs, 3,359 were handed out to girls.

This year, 42,947 female candidates registered for JEE (Advanced) 2024. Of these, 7,964 candidates made the cut.

The southern zone has a disproportionately large share of females. Their journey begins early. Not only have as many bagged a seat, but the proportion of girls — about 15,000 — who register from the southern zone is almost a third of all female aspirants. This zone comprises Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry. Close to 2,600 from this zone qualified after the entrance exams to join the IITs.

Six years after the supernumerary female quota was introduced in the IITs, almost every campus has an average of 19.7% girls. In 2018, the quota for women was 14%, which was increased to 17% the next year, and 20% thereafter.

IIT Delhi aims to move towards a 50:50 gender ratio on its campus. "Women are performing well in all fields of STEM at IIT Delhi. As we are moving towards becoming multi-disciplinary and opening more programmes like design, public policy, we are seeing that a good diverse mix adds so much to the richness of the educational experience," IIT Delhi director Rangan Banerjee said.

"While there is already an ecosystem to make everyone comfortable, we want to change the mindset towards science and engineering in a way that our campus' gender ratio is reflective of India's population numbers. We are also making efforts to encourage more women in schools to take up STEM subjects through targeted outreach and research exposure. The ultimate goal is that gender becomes a non-issue," Banerjee said.

A professor from IIT Madras said: "The gender mix has improved. Importantly, it has become better course-wise too. There used to be just about one or two girls in CS [computer science], but with the horizontal reservation (in every course), we have over 20 girls and about 70 boys," the professor said.

The supernumerary quota is hailed as an experiment that has brought much positivity to the IIT campuses that had distressingly low numbers of women. "Socially, this is going to have a long-term profound impact. IITs are creating leaders of tomorrow. So, a lot of these women who will graduate from the IITs will go on to occupy the top echelons — the country will see many women CEOs, and several top bankers will be women," an IIT Bombay dean said.

These additional reserved seats were the recommendation of a committee headed by Timothy A Gonsalves, former director, IIT Mandi. The institutes have come a long way from the 1990s when the ratio was close to 10:1 in favour of boys, which decreased to 7:1 in the early 2000s, and then to 4:1 in the mid and late 2000s.

But it deteriorated, and in 2014, most IITs had anywhere between 5% and 12% of the girl student population on their campuses. A year before the supernumerary seats were allotted to females, the IITs admitted 995 girls and 9,883 boys.