India enrolled 1.02 crore students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in 2023 – 24, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) report 2023 – 24; women accounted for 44 per cent of this group. Yet this strong representation in education does not endure through research careers. The Department of Science and Technology’s Research and Development Statistics at a Glance 2025 – 26 reports that women accounted for 29% of India’s full-time-equivalent researchers in R&D. A 2024 peer-reviewed BiasWatchIndia study, using faculty data from 98 institutions in 2020 – 21, found an overall women-faculty base rate of 16.6 per cent, with wide variation across fields and institutions.

We have the laws. We are missing the will to use them.

India already has a legal framework recognising women’s right to equality, safety, and continuity at work. Constitutional protections prohibit discrimination, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (POSH Act) addresses sexual harassment, and the Code on Social Security, 2020, entitles eligible women to up to 26 weeks of maternity benefit. Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions (GATI), modelled on the United Kingdom’s Athena Swan framework, introduced institutional self-assessment and accreditation across 30 pilot institutions. The Science and Engineering Research Board’s Promoting Opportunities for Women in Exploratory Research (SERB-POWER) program addresses gender disparity in science and engineering research funding through competitive grants and fellowships for women researchers.

This architecture has not translated into sustained change. GATI has not yet become a mandatory, funding-linked national framework, with sustained monitoring across publicly funded research institutions. Legal entitlements also remain vulnerable to workplace culture. Early-career women researchers in the India RISE Fellowship describe returning to laboratories days after giving birth, not because the law requires it, but because the informal penalties for taking leave can feel greater than the protection the law promises.

The invisible architecture of exclusion

What keeps women out of research leadership is rarely a single, visible barrier.  It is more often the accumulation of smaller decisions that appear neutral in isolation but become exclusionary in effect. 

Conversations emerging from the India RISE Fellowship point to these quieter forms of exclusion. India RISE Fellow Dr Anubhuti Joshi, a Master of Public Health Tutor and Demonstrator at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Rishikesh, observes: ​“In many institutions, the people who are most dependable gradually become the ones carrying disproportionate administrative and coordination work, often at the cost of their own research growth and leadership development.” Her observation is qualitative, but it aligns with Indian research on how patriarchal and hierarchical work cultures shape the experience of women scientists, as well as broader experimental evidence that women are more often asked to take on, and accept, tasks with low promotability. 

These patterns rarely surface in policy documents, which makes them hard to challenge formally. They erode the research and leadership-development time that is the real currency of an academic career. By the time data shows women missing from senior roles, the decisions behind it were made years earlier, one informal assignment at a time.

Investing in individual women through confidence training, mentorship, and re-entry schemes is necessary but insufficient. Women should not be asked to grow more resilient in systems that keep demanding more resilience from them. The burden must shift from individual women to the systems shaping their opportunities.

What accountability looks like

Countries with real progress on gender equity built accountability into their institutions rather than waiting for goodwill. Iceland mandates equal pay audits and fines non-compliant companies. Rwanda reached over sixty percent women in its lower house through constitutional mandate. The UK’s Athena Swan Charter tied research funding to gender audits, and applications from medical departments rose sharply once funding was on the line.

India has the policy foundation. What it lacks is enforcement scaffolding that makes compliance real and progress measurable. A national gender equity index for research institutions, with binding reporting and funding consequences, would do more than a decade of voluntary initiatives. Requiring centrally funded STEM institutions to publish annual gender-disaggregated data on hiring, promotion, leadership, grants, and attrition would make the invisible visible. At present, India is not measuring enough to hold its research institutions meaningfully accountable.

A 2025 evaluation found that the Supernumerary Seats Scheme, which created additional seats for women in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) undergraduate programs, met its target of women constituting 20 per cent of enrolment across most IITs. Targeted supernumerary seats should therefore extend to other centrally funded institutions where comparable entry gaps persist as an upstream measure to improve women’s representation in research. Building on GATI’s institutional self-assessment model, India should move from the 30-institution pilot to national implementation, with tiered accreditation and permanent monitoring. Where tenure-clock assessments are used, approved maternity and childcare leave should be excluded from the assessment window in practice and compliance audited. Leadership and committee appointments should use publicly announced criteria and transparent selection wherever statutory rules permit, reducing the informal gatekeeping documented across scientific academies and unions. 

Most of these reforms are not prohibitively expensive. What they require is a directive, a monitoring mechanism, and the political will to follow through, alongside an honest acknowledgement that the status quo is not neutral. Every year they are delayed, careers shorten, and the research ecosystem produces less than it could. 

What society needs to step up and do

Institutional reform without cultural shift will always be incomplete. Across South Asia, research identifies marriage, care responsibilities, safety, and transport as barriers to women’s employment. India’s latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS 2025) offers a national measure of the care constraint: among women outside the labour force, 44.4 per cent cited childcare or personal commitments in homemaking as their main reason. For research institutions, these pressures translate into concrete responsibilities, including safe transport and accommodation, credible harassment-reporting systems, and leave and care policies that women can use without informal penalty. 

Men have a role that India’s gender equity conversation consistently underuses. When a senior faculty member defaults to nominating male colleagues for awards, or a department head assigns women additional administrative work without question, these are not defaults. They are choices, and they can be made differently.

Finally, India must stop treating women who advance as exceptions. Exceptionalism is a trap. When the narrative around women in leadership is one of individual triumph against the odds, it lets institutions off the hook. The goal is not to produce remarkable women who overcome broken systems. The goal is to build systems in which women’s leadership is unremarkably expected, normal, and structurally supported.

The reform India can no longer defer

India has set an ambition to become a $30 trillion economy by 2047. The World Bank estimates that closing the gender gap in labour force participation could raise GDP per capita by around 20 per cent, returns India is not yet capturing.

India already has the legal foundation, the policy precedents, and the institutional examples to show reform works when implemented. What it needs now is the boldness to move from pilot to policy, from intent to accountability, from celebrating women who persist despite the system to redesigning that very system so that extraordinary persistence is no longer a prerequisite for participation.

The talent has always been here. The question is whether our institutions and our society are finally ready to stop wasting it.