Women in Education: Overcoming Barriers in a Learning Society

For most of human history, the lecture hall, the laboratory, and the library were marked “men only.” Women who wanted to learn were told their brains were too small, their bodies too fragile, or their futures too domestic to need a degree. Today, more women than ever sit in classrooms, and in many countries they outnumber men in undergraduate programmes. Yet the story is far from over. Quiet gaps still persist in who studies what, who teaches at the top, and who earns the most. To understand where a learning society is heading, we have to look honestly at how far women have come and how much ground remains.

A long history of being kept out
The Indian experience
The picture today: enrolment looks promising
The stubborn gaps inside the numbers
The STEM divide
The completion problem
From student to scholar: the leaky pipeline
STEM departments are even thinner
Pay and rank: the gap you do not always see
What is being done, and what still needs to change
Why this matters for a learning society

A long history of being kept out

The earliest universities, born in medieval Europe, were religious institutions that quite literally did not imagine women as scholars. Elena Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman to earn a PhD in 1678 in Padua, but as one historical account notes, the University of Padua did not award another doctorate to a woman for three centuries. That single sentence captures the scale of exclusion. Even when a woman pushed through, the door was promptly closed behind her.

The reasons offered for keeping women out were dressed up as science and morality. Educators and physicians argued that intellectual effort would damage women’s reproductive health, that the female brain could not handle abstract reasoning, and that giving women degrees would unsettle the family. Oxford, for example, permitted only a handful of professors’ wives to audit lectures, and justified its exclusion through arguments about female inferiority and the unsuitability of higher education for women, refusing to grant full degrees to women until 1920.

The Indian experience

In colonial India, formal higher education for women began only in the late 19th century. Kadambini Ganguly and Chandramukhi Basu, who graduated from Bethune College in 1883, were among the first women in the British Empire to earn university degrees. Their achievement was extraordinary precisely because it cut against deeply held beliefs that a woman’s education ended at the threshold of the home. Pandita Ramabai, Savitribai Phule, and Fatima Sheikh similarly fought social ostracism to open schools and to argue that learning belonged to women too. Their struggle laid the foundation for every classroom an Indian woman walks into today.

The picture today: enrolment looks promising

Numbers on paper have shifted dramatically. According to the latest All India Survey on Higher Education, women account for 48 percent of total higher education enrolment, and they have contributed 55 percent of the total increase in enrolment since 2014-15. In several states, the Gross Enrolment Ratio for women has even nudged ahead of that for men.

Behind these headlines, women have been quietly excelling. They earn around 42 percent of doctoral degrees and now make up roughly half of all science graduates. In disciplines like medicine, biology, and the humanities, women’s participation is robust. So if you only looked at admission figures, you might conclude that the gender battle in education is nearly won.

The stubborn gaps inside the numbers

Look closer, however, and the picture grows more uneven. The first crack appears the moment we ask what women are studying.

The STEM divide

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the fields most closely tied to high-paying jobs and the digital economy, continue to lean male. AISHE data shows that in 2020-21, women made up only 30.2 percent of undergraduate enrolments in engineering and technology. In Computer Engineering, the most popular technical undergraduate stream in India, women account for only about 34 percent of students.

The drivers of this skew start long before college. Girls often get less time on shared household smartphones, less encouragement to tinker with technology, and fewer relatable role models in robotics or coding clubs. A recent analysis points out that 70 percent of boys could use a smartphone for basic digital tasks compared to 62 percent of girls in a national survey, and that gap compounds with every passing year of schooling.

The completion problem

Enrolling is not the same as finishing. Girls in India still drop out of school and college at higher rates than boys, often due to socio-economic pressures, early marriage, unsafe transport, and the absence of proper sanitation facilities. After Class 8, when puberty makes school washrooms a daily concern, dropout spikes are especially sharp in rural areas. Many promising young women never reach a university classroom not because they lack ability, but because the infrastructure around them quietly pushes them out.

From student to scholar: the leaky pipeline

The most uncomfortable gaps appear once we stop looking at students and start looking at teachers. Women may be half of all undergraduates, but they thin out at every higher rung of the academic ladder.

An analysis using UGC and AISHE data found that although women make up about 49 percent of undergraduate and postgraduate enrolments and 42 percent of doctoral degree recipients, they occupy only 28 percent of higher education teaching positions, with the share falling sharply at senior ranks like professor, dean, and vice-chancellor. Earlier AISHE figures showed that only about 17 percent of vice-chancellor and director positions across Indian universities are held by women, while women are over-represented at the lowest rung of tutors and demonstrators.

This pattern has a name in research literature: the leaky pipeline. At every stage, from PhD completion to assistant professorship to full professorship, a disproportionate share of women drops out of academia. A recent study on economics academia in India observed that women’s participation declines sharply at the PhD completion stage and further diminishes in faculty recruitment and senior academic roles, with limited mentorship, gender stereotypes, and exclusion from professional networks identified as central reasons.

STEM departments are even thinner

In Indian STEM institutions, the situation is starker still. A survey of 98 universities by BiasWatchIndia found that Indian science academia has a dearth of women researchers at all levels, who are under-represented, under-mentored, and overlooked for awards, grants, and career-advancing opportunities. The median base rate of women faculty was just 16.7 percent, with engineering departments touching as low as 8.3 percent.

Pay and rank: the gap you do not always see

Even when women do enter and stay in academia, what they earn often lags behind their male colleagues. The simplest reason is that pay in universities is tightly linked to rank, and women are clustered in the lower ranks.

A large study of a public university system found that around 45 percent of women faculty were full professors compared to 62 percent of men, and that faculty rank alone explained a large portion of the salary gap. In other words, the pay gap is not always about two people doing the same job and being paid differently. It is about a system that promotes men into the highest-paid roles more quickly and more often.

Other forms of unequal pay are harder to track. Research grants, consulting work, conference invitations, and named lecture honoraria all add up, and women in academia are routinely under-represented in panels, plenary speakers, and award nominations. These invisible advantages, what researchers call accumulative privilege, mean that even two faculty members on the same official salary scale can have very different career trajectories and lifetime earnings.

What is being done, and what still needs to change

Indian policy has begun to respond. The National Education Policy 2020 proposes a Gender Inclusion Fund to support disadvantaged learners, and several states run cycle, scholarship, and free transport schemes that have visibly improved girls’ attendance. Reservation in faculty recruitment under the SC, ST, OBC, and EWS categories has expanded the pool of women entering universities. International commitments like Sustainable Development Goal 4 keep gender equity in education on the agenda.

Still, real change will require attention to the parts of the journey that policy posters rarely show. Safer campuses and transport reduce dropout. Mentoring networks help young women see academic careers as plausible. Transparent promotion criteria close pay and rank gaps. Childcare support and flexible tenure clocks make it possible to combine research with family life. Diverse hiring panels reduce the unconscious bias that quietly favours male candidates. None of these alone solves the problem, but together they begin to dismantle a system built over centuries on the assumption that the scholar is male.

Why this matters for a learning society

A learning society is not just one where more people get degrees. It is one where knowledge is produced, debated, and applied by the full diversity of its members. When women are pushed out of STEM, the technology built in their absence reflects only half of human experience, sometimes with serious consequences for medicine, public safety, and product design. When women are missing from the top of universities, the questions a society chooses to research, the role models its students see, and the cultures of its institutions all narrow.

Expanding women’s role in education is therefore not a favour. It is a structural upgrade to how a society thinks. India has already shown that progress is possible. The next chapter is about depth: ensuring that the woman who walks into a classroom today can also walk out as a published professor, a vice-chancellor, or the founder of a new research field.

What do you think? If enrolment numbers for women in higher education are nearly equal to men’s, why do you think the gap widens so sharply at the professor and vice-chancellor levels? Which one change, whether in schools, families, or workplaces, would do the most to close that gap in your own community?

References

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Women in Education: Overcoming Barriers in a Learning Society

Table of Contents

A long history of being kept out 🔗

The Indian experience 🔗

The picture today: enrolment looks promising 🔗

The stubborn gaps inside the numbers 🔗

The STEM divide 🔗

The completion problem 🔗

From student to scholar: the leaky pipeline 🔗

STEM departments are even thinner 🔗

Pay and rank: the gap you do not always see 🔗

What is being done, and what still needs to change 🔗

Why this matters for a learning society 🔗