Equality Is Everyone’s Work

Context: Establishing women-only chairs, like recent one in IIT Bombay, does not address the root cause of gender disparity in science and technology. Institutions must do more to overcome legacy of discrimination.

Gender disparity in science and technology

• Low representation: Women constitute nearly 50% of science PhDs employed in Indian higher education.
  • However, granular statistics from physics, engineering and the industrial workforce show a large gender gap that widens further at the higher echelons.
  • Despite similar scientific productivity, women scientists tended to occupy lower rungs of the institutional hierarchy.
• Systemic genderisation: Playing out in multiple ways –
  • It is still often assumed by men and women that women are the primary caregivers and, therefore, liable to compromise their professional responsibilities.
  • It is still considered okay to judge the parental or life-partner status of a woman scientist while deciding to hire her or give her a leadership position, overlooking her merit.

Way Forward:

• Make diversity an imperative: Not just because it“...builds better businesses,” but because it is the right and just thing to do.
• Acknowledge that gender discrimination: Stop women-only training workshops to “fix the women” and instead gender-sensitise all faculty and management.
  • Invest in diversity experts (not necessarily women) to be observers on all hiring, assessment and conference planning committees.
• Involve social scientists: So that interventions are grounded in evidence.
  • Eminent IIT Bombay professors Pravina Parikh and Suhas Sukhatme, decades ago, involved their sociologist colleague Indira Mahadevan when recommending, inter alia, JEE fee-waivers for women.
• Addressing disparity should be everybody’s responsibility: It is all too common to regard it the exclusive responsibility of women to hire more women, to invite women to conferences and edit books, and even to mentor young women. This notion amounts to an abdication of responsibility by the men.

Conclusion: Gender disparity is an outcome of a flawed meritocracy and is everybody’s responsibility, not just that of women chairs, to fix.