Marriage, education: Why there have been so few women in hallowed IAS

From 1951, when the first woman joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), until 2020, women have made up only 13% of all IAS officers.

Of 11,569 IAS officers who entered the civil services between 1951 and 2020, only 1,527 were women, shows an IndiaSpend analysis of the Indian Administrative Service Officers Dataset compiled by the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) at Ashoka University.

To be sure, India has come a long way from when the board that interviewed Anna Rajam George, the first woman to pass the IAS exam, actively discouraged her, asking her to consider the foreign or