Indian science’s Y chromosome bias

One of the first things I am asked by strangers meeting me for the first time is: Why would a woman like me study physics and pursue an entrepreneurial career in a branch of science such as genomics? I am apparently an oddity. I hope these odds change during my lifetime and my daughters don’t get asked the same questions.

As a child I had all the luxury to read, dream and transform my life the way I wanted it to be. I went to IIT Kharagpur to study physics as I always wanted to study physics. It did not seem like an odd decision and I often dreamt of making ground-breaking discoveries.

However, as I discovered my true calling, I recalibrated my aspirations to become an entrepreneur in science and that was perfectly fine by my family. In the environment I grew up in, everything was possible.

But over the years I have realised that I was special and privileged, and that my parents were extraordinary and my family truly supportive. It wasn’t the same for those around me and others in India, especially women who wanted a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). There is a massive drop-off of women, especially at the leadership level, and it bothers me that we remain a check mark for diversity at senior leadership levels in both academia and the corporate world.

Like you, I have seen statistics about women in STEM strewn around the internet and conferences. In the media, we often hear about the large number of women who don’t have access to any education, leave alone good quality education, and many schools don’t even have access to a lab or computers. Girls, if sent to schools, go to the closest one and get the barest education; often they get married before they complete a graduate degree or, perhaps, even earlier depending on where they are located. And most of the times, it is not in science or technology.

I will, for argument’s sake, take only the urban middle-class as an example, as the situation in villages is worse. Girls are conditioned to believe their education is to ensure that their kids can get educated. Girls are reminded to be gentle and obedient and that their aim in life is to get married and reproduce and thereby complete the circle of life.

This conditioning is dangerous and has an effect on the overall leadership roles we see for women. Of course there are the occasional rebels and rogues that manage to reach leadership roles, and we have several examples of those in India.

Moving to the more mundane social milieu like the one I am familiar with, girls are the crown jewels in almost every primary and high school. When I was growing up, the top positions were dominated by women.

This may not be true for everyone, but we had a particularly strong woman dominance in our class and that matters as peers influence our minds heavily at that age. At the undergraduate level, engineering schools such as the IITs show a rapid fall in the number of women.

Women are just 14 per cent of the total scientific community in India and the story at the top is even worse. Women are under-represented in top jobs. Just one woman director at a CSIR lab, and that too in 2013, for the first time in India’s history.

And so the case of women in the STEM funnel resembles our famous drug discovery — one where you start with thousands of compounds and end up with a handful of possible targets. Similarly, women make up 50 per cent of the population but only a handful make it to the top.

So I hope that just as drug discovery has been revolutionised by new technologies such as genomics, technology and out-of-the-box techniques can help us come to a personalised approach to this problem.

Confidence in women is one of the key areas to focus on. Parents are the harbingers of hope for the country. The second important factor is education; it makes a big difference as peers start to influence our minds at a young age.

Another key factor is aspiration. We become what we read about and what we see around us. Growing up in a campus town full of scientists made us all want to become one of them. The other key thing we must all do is encourage more girls to read fiction as it fuels the imagination and allows them to think beyond what is in front of them. Another thing that encourages women in STEM would be competitions — in the form of games, awards and recognition. That is a powerful motivator.

The next challenge is our environment-induced biases. I remember a lecture by Mahzarin Banaji from Harvard about the hidden biases of good people. She did a simple test on a class that was highly educated where each of us thought we did not have biases. Alas, that was not true. When you extrapolate this to a larger, less-sophisticated audience, you realise how widespread biases can be.

In general, the perception is that STEM fields are harder for women and therefore men are likely to get a better chance at securing a position. Movies and media also have a role in shaping and influencing our biases and it is important that the messages sent out can help mitigate the current biases that exist in our society and change stereotyped images. My hope is that social media becomes ‘family influential’ — we all have a role to play there too.

Once in the workplace, there are some obvious steps that can be taken to ensure that more women are recognised early in their careers as engineers and technologists or the job they do, rather than adding a ‘woman’ as a prefix to that recognition.

The other issues are to do with relocation and reimbursement and if we can address these using out-of-the-box measures, we are likely to see more women in STEM follow their dreams.

Most of us do not know many Nobel laureates who are women in STEM. There are 47 women who have won the Nobel prize and Marie Curie won it twice. While several of these women are from STEM fields, they are not glorified enough. Once that happens, aspirations will change over a period of time.

The other thing we need to do is to find effective mentors who can gently guide them through their careers. This cannot be forced.

And now the part that probably drives political leaders. Apparently countries with better policies for women do better at empowering women. India has some great policies. We have a right to education, right to livelihood and so on, and now the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao scheme. While the concept and the thought process are good, I have a strong suspicion that schemes have a natural tendency to slip through the cracks especially with the passage of time and the introduction of more schemes.

We have to look at a systemic treatment to this issue that plagues our mind and clouds our thinking about the fantastic effect a nation can have when more women innovate, invent and invest in the STEM field.

The writer is the CEO Mapmygenome

COMMENT NOW