Women make progress but higher education has gender balance problem still

IIM Raipur admits more women than men in its PG course but top engineering and management institutes need more diversity

 A seminal work in development economics studied peach orchard workers in China. Researchers found that the children of educated female workers were more likely to be healthier and better educated. Similar studies in India prompted the government to educate the girl child and hand out monetary benefits to females instead of male household members. Last year, a Business Standard analysis found that districts with a higher number of college-educated females had better Covid-19 vaccination rates.

Better education does not help women with more jobs or higher earnings. India’s female labour force participation, already paltry before the pandemic, has declined. An analysis of Employee Provident Fund data — a proxy for formal sector employment — shows that the post-pandemic recovery in formal employment has been less emphatic for females. The latest Global Gender Gap 2022 Index shows that despite the rising proportion of women in technical, professional and managerial work, their incomes have not increased commensurately. Estimated income earned increased 40 per cent for women between 2012 and 2022 and improved 75.7 per cent for men.

The issue may also relate to the quality of education. Analysis shows that though women’s participation in professional courses is increasing, there is a wide disparity when it comes to premier institutes.

Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Raipur was the first premier management institute this year that inducted more women than men in its postgraduate programme. The ratio of women enrolled in the top three IIMs is less than a third of total admissions. The batch profile of students admitted last year shows that 23 per cent of students in IIM Ahmedabad were females; the ratio was 31 per cent for IIM Calcutta and 29.5 per cent for IIM Bangalore. In contrast, All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) data for 2020 shows that of the 0.6 million students admitted to MBA programmes across the country, 42.6 per cent were women.

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are no different. In 2017, the ratio of female students in India’s premier engineering institutes was less than 10 per cent. It has now increased to around 20 per cent, but it is lower than the national average. AISHE data shows that of the 2.1 million students pursuing B.Tech courses, 28.5 per cent were women.

Across courses, women formed 49 per cent of college enrolments in 2020. Indian education’s focus should be on promoting diversity in professional courses and premier institutions.