The question facing India is no longer simply how to get more women into STEM, but which parts they enter, where they study and, eventually, where they work and lead. Science and engineering, both within STEM, are very different worlds in disaggregated data.
India has already achieved something many countries still struggle with: women make up a remarkably large share of its science and technology students. In science itself, women are at or above parity at several levels of higher education.
The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) for 2023-24 recorded nearly 10.2 million students in STEM courses across undergraduate, postgraduate, MPhil and PhD levels. Around 4.4 million, or 44%, were women. That reflects India’s long-term investment in female scientific human capital.
Yet follow these women beyond the national STEM aggregates, and a very different picture emerges. They are much less represented in engineering, scarcer still in elite engineering institutions, and under-represented in sectors where India’s R&D economy is expanding fastest. The question facing India is therefore no longer simply how to get more women into STEM, but which parts they enter, where they study and, eventually, where they work and lead.
Science and engineering, both within STEM, are very different worlds in disaggregated data. Of roughly 5.56 million students enrolled in science, including mathematics, in 2023-24, 54.6% were women. They were 53.4% of undergraduates, 61.4% of postgraduates and 53.4% of PhD scholars. Women do not merely have a significant presence in Indian science. They already constitute a majority.
Engineering and technology look very different. Women constitute only around 31% of undergraduate enrolment. At the country’s most prestigious engineering institutions, the gap sharpens. Female representation in IIT admissions has hovered near 20% since 2020. In 2025, women were 3,664 of 18,188 admissions, or 20.15%.
The divergence extends beyond college gates into workplaces. The India Decoding Jobs 2025 report estimates that women account for only around 3% of the workforce in core engineering roles in India’s heavy manufacturing and engineering sector, rising to 12% in other technological positions. Based on a primary survey of human resources executives across diverse industry sectors, it shows how women’s representation varies with the part of the technical economy examined.
These data points bifurcate women’s participation in STEM careers into two questions. The participation question asks whether women acquire scientific and technical education at all. The allocation question asks where those skills ultimately go, into which disciplines, institutions, occupations and sectors.
Allocation can also occur within organisations. The India Decoding Jobs 2025 report notes that India’s IT sector presents almost the reverse case of heavy engineering. Women make up 36% of its workforce, yet hold only 11% of leadership roles and 8% of C-suite positions. Women can therefore remain inside STEM without being equally represented across its occupations or positions of authority.
The latest Department of Science and Technology data show women’s participation in research has risen substantially. As of April 1, 2024, India had around 5.07 lakh full-time-equivalent (FTE) researchers, including 1.47 lakh women. Women’s share of the FTE research workforce rose from 18.6% in 2020–21 to 29% in 2023–24. That is significant progress. But the aggregate again hides an important distribution.
Women constituted 36% of researchers in higher education in 2023–24. Their share fell to 28% in the state sector (State Agricultural Universities and state R&D laboratories), 21.9% in major Central government R&D laboratories, 21.2% in public-sector industry and just 17.8% in private-sector industry. Representation is therefore roughly twice as high in higher education as in private industrial R&D.
That difference matters against the shifting structure of India’s research expenditure. The DST’s Research & Development Statistics at a Glance 2025–26 estimates private-sector industry’s share of India’s gross expenditure on R&D rose from 32.2% in 2020–21 to 45.2% in 2023–24. Over the same period, higher education rose from 8.8% to 12.6%. Central-sector institutions and laboratories accounted for 30.9%.
The juxtaposition is striking. Higher education, where women researchers are most strongly represented, accounts for 12.6% of national R&D expenditure. Private-sector industry, where women are only 17.8% of researchers, accounts for 45.2%. A higher share of expenditure does not automatically mean better jobs, greater influence or superior careers. Nor do these data show women are being pushed away from research-intensive sectors.
What they do show is that women researchers and India’s R&D resources are distributed differently across the research system. Different sectors offer different scientific careers and pathways to influence. The question is whether women have equal access to that full range as India’s research economy evolves.
A major impediment to explaining these differences is that several foundational indicators remain unmeasured. These include school and university subject choice, institution type, which industries recruit from which institutions, where corporate R&D is located, constraints on mobility, preferences for job security and predictable hours, career interruptions from care work, recruitment practices, and workplace culture. Several probably operate at once.
India therefore needs longitudinal evidence linking qualifications to employment. Of men and women completing comparable STEM degrees, what share enter research occupations? Among PhD holders in the same discipline, do men and women enter different sectors? How much movement is there between academia, government laboratories and industry, and where does the gap widen most?
Such data would also move India towards a second generation of STEM policy, one that asks not just how women enter STEM but what happens to their skills afterwards. This matters as the innovation system changes. Private industry is taking a growing share of national R&D expenditure, making women’s participation in industrial research increasingly consequential.
Though the participation challenge persists in engineering, and elite technical institutions remain heavily male, India’s investment in educating millions of women in science and technology has shown remarkable results. That progress raises a new question. As the country expands industrial research and seeks to convert scientific capability into economic growth, is its research economy making full use of the women scientists it has already produced? The barrier now is not only unequal representation but the underuse of scientific human capital.
The next question for Indian STEM policy is therefore not how many women enter the pipeline or how many leak out. It is where the women who remain ultimately land, and whether that is where India’s economy is heading.
*Amit Kapoor is chair & Mukul Anand is senior researcher at Institute for Competitiveness.X: @kautiliya.
