This is not just a leaky but a badly broken pipeline! – IIT Delhi Sociologist Fights for Gender Equity

Sociologists are a rare breed in a place such as IIT. How did you find yourself there?

I’ve now completed 28 years at IIT Delhi and my entry was pretty smooth. I had never heard of the Departments of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at IITs, thinking that the institutes taught nothing but engineering. I was intrigued when I applied, and it was only later that I became aware that the teaching of humanities and social sciences to engineering undergraduates was mandated in the founding vision of the IITs, spelt out in the Sarkar Committee Report of 1948. This vision was based on the model of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology which had stalwarts such as the linguist Noam Chomsky. What is nice is, especially today, the interfacing of technology and society is becoming so crucial and unavoidable to study.

Your years of work at IIT Delhi involved a measure of activism. Tell us about your initiatives.

Since the beginning, I kind of followed the Marxist dictum of “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, The point, however, is to change it.” My approach is feminist, but I call myself a tempered radical. Some scholars used the term to describe people committed to an organisation but also to a cause. That’s where I fit best.

After the horrific rape in Delhi, my colleague Sangeeta Kohli from the Mechanical Engineering Department and I set up a Gender Awareness Committee, after which a more formalised unit emerged: IIT Delhi’s gender unit, the Initiative for Gender Equity and Sensitisation (IGES). At IGES, we conducted gender-sensitisation workshops with the entire institute community and created interactive e-modules on POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment). Now we have the Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI), and IGES became a vertical under it.

My study on the underperformance of students at IIT unexpectedly found that despite women’s ranking at IIT entrance tests, they excelled as a group while studying at IIT. This led to the novel supernumerary seats scheme (additional seats) to meet IIT’s goal of achieving 20 per cent of women students by 2022.

Common spaces at IIT Delhi, whether real or virtual, were de facto male spaces. I started an all-women’s faculty email list, which later moved into an online community of women faculty, now a vibrant space.

Can you tell us about the mammoth gender audit for DST’s GATI project that you took up at IIT Delhi?

The work of this scale can only be a group effort, so I have to commend all the faculty, students, and staff who worked on this with me. The fine-grained data that was asked for in the report was extremely difficult to collect. We produced a 200-page report that was a result of interviews, surveys, and data collection we did with faculty, administrative positions, students, faculty, and staff. All the learning from it all went into the report. We did get an award from DST but I’m not fulfilled because GATI seems to now be at a standstill. However, the exercise and the report have resulted in sensitising the institute’s committee at several levels.

Tell us about your experiences teaching popular humanities courses at IIT.

The Gender Technology and Society course I began in 1997 remains popular, as it relates to all genders by exploring their interplay in society and technology. My PhD students have studied technology’s impacts on areas like IVF, surrogacy, online matchmaking, and femtech for women’s health. Over time, I observed this tech-society interface expanding among my students and others at IIT Delhi, leading colleagues to teach it too.

Similarly, my course on Environment, Development, and Society has a comparable teaching experience. Courses on Gender and Society and Ethnographic Methods attract students from several departments. During a B.Tech course on sociological theory, I discussed society’s stigmatisation of people with disabilities and how “normal” perceive their experiences. A computer science student applied this knowledge in a project on smart canes for the visually impaired.

How have your own gendered experiences at IIT Delhi panned out over the years?

I’ll share an early impression. Our department is on the sixth floor, and when I joined, tea and lunch were on the seventh. I attended an 8 am to 9:30 a.m. class, after which, I’d go for tea. Upon my first visit, the male faculty fell silent; no one invited me to join them. Initially, as a teacher, you’re not so involved with the rest of the institute outside the department.

I recall being on a committee early on, and as usual, given IITs’ faculty gender ratios, committees would be all men and senior men at that. They would have their inside jokes, and there was a lot of backslapping. And it didn’t create a comfortable atmosphere for me as the lone female committee member.

There has been progress since, but we have miles to go!

IITs were and still are, a very, very male-dominated environment. And they were totally or wilfully unaware of the poor gender ratios among students and faculty until very recently, which is the story we will get to.

Yes, please tell us about your ongoing project: STEMTheGap.

There’s a lot of unconscious bias still, and there can also be deliberate bias at our STEM institutes. In this multidisciplinary five-year project, we want to understand the barriers to women’s inclusion rigorously. We have researched the effects and challenges the IITs have seen after the supernumerary scheme was introduced to increase the percentage of girls in the B.Tech degree to 20 per cent, but there are feelings of impostorism in the women joining.

Our quantitative studies examine gender differences in exam-taking, leadership, faculty’s research productivity, and biases in gender attitudes at the workplace. This vertical has been helmed by my colleague Nandana Sengupta of IIT Delhi’s School of Public Policy. The qualitative studies, headed by me, focus on the science aspirations of school girls, the impact of intimate relationships on PhD/postdoc students’ career trajectories, and factors contributing to missing women leaders in STEM.

Finally, we have also looked at how female students’ educational experiences are shaped by the built environment of the campus, which reflects a masculine legacy. Because of this and other gender issues at the institute, the gender ratios of faculty in the STEM disciplines remain dismal. There is an utter mismatch between the ratio of female faculty and female PhD students, with 53 per cent female PhD students.

This is not just a leaky but a badly broken pipeline!