In 1996, Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist trained at Miranda House and the Delhi School of Economics found herself joining the faculty of Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) — an unlikely place for someone like her. Her work as a teacher was deeply influenced by a galaxy of Indian sociologists from the 1970s and 80s, such as Khadija Gupta, Uma Ramaswamy, Andre Beteille, Jit Singh Uberoi, Veena Das, A.M. Shah and T.N. Madan.
As a social anthropologist, she worked as a consultant with the World Bank on forestry projects in India in the 80s and the 90s. “Forestry is where I began to understand gender issues,” she says. Understanding how women related to forests compared with men helped her contribute to the country’s afforestation policies. Another among her policy-informing research is the country-wide studies on sex selection practices and their implications for girls and women.
From the early years, Ravinder’s work has interfaced with technology and gender. And hence, unexpectedly, she finds herself at the helm of her career at IIT Delhi — one of India’s leading STEM technology education and research institutes.
In this interview, Ravinder discusses her academic journey, highlighting her ongoing project STEMTheGap, which is based at her home institute, where she is still active as an Emerita Professor. Ravinder emphasised the challenges in achieving an equitable STEM culture, citing her work that spans not just academics but also her gender activism at IIT Delhi. For Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions (GATI), an unprecedented gender audit program under the central government’s Department of Science and Technology (DST), she was IIT Delhi’s nodal officer. Her team’s efforts won IIT Delhi the GATI Achievers award, one among 12 institutes (out of 30) to receive this honour.
She also ruminates about her long career, her philosophy on harnessing equity at STEM institutes, and the recent initiatives that are poised to improve the IIT ecosystem that has long been a male bastion.
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. Constantly, I’ve been trying to do things at IIT Delhi without rejecting the institution as such.
Sociologists are a rare breed in a place like IIT. You have also called yourself an ‘Accidental IITian.’ Can you explain why?
I’ve now completed 28 years at IIT Delhi. I had never heard of the Departments of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at IITs, thinking that IITs taught nothing but engineering. If social scientists ever spoke of engineers it was with some derision; they were “technocrats”, people who were likely to be ill-informed about larger social structures that shape science and technology; they tended to be preoccupied with innovation and efficiency. They saw themselves as “problem-solvers” while social science knowledge was seen as fuzzy and not serving any useful purpose. On our side, we were preoccupied with critiques of science and technology that focused on the deleterious effects of large-scale technologies on human society.
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, as spelled out in the Sarkar Committee Report of 1948. This vision was based on the model of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), home to stalwarts like the linguist Noam Chomsky, and which besides engineering also taught pure sciences and humanities. Later I also discovered that some of the IITs were very well known for their philosophers, linguists and sociologists. I learned that these departments also had independent PhD programs in humanities and social science disciplines. Over time, as the IITs have grown, so have their HSS departments,
With the rapid expansion of technologies into every domain of human life, it is becoming crucial and unavoidable to understand the interfacing of technology and society through a social science lens.
Your years of work at IIT Delhi involved some measure of activism. Tell us about your initiatives over the years.
At the level of master’s and PhD, I became interested in theories of practice to understand structures of practice by looking at people’s everyday lives. Looking at people’s material cultures—like the kind of place we sit in, the kind of food we eat, the utensils we use, the crops we grow, and the technologies we use – as communicative languages—they tell you about society and its social structure. How we inhabit spaces also maps hierarchies like caste. Science and technology are also material practices, socially embedded ones.
Since the beginning, I followed the Marxist dictum of “Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” The strong desire to change things for the better with what one learnt from one’s research explorations was always there. I think everything I’ve done, teaching or research has always had a gender aspect, and all my work also has this practice aspect.
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. Constantly, I’ve been trying to do things at IIT Delhi without rejecting the institution as such.
In the wake of the horrific rape in Delhi in 2012, we set up a Gender Awareness Committee that ran workshops on the prevention of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, consent, and other topics. My colleague Sangeeta Kohli from the mechanical engineering department and I were the crusaders of the initiative, and then others joined. In 2018, a more formalised unit emerged: IIT Delhi’s gender unit named “Initiative for Gender Equity and Sensitisation” (IGES). We wanted something more weighty, with a budget that could sustain ongoing efforts. V. Ramgopal Rao was the Director then. He was extremely supportive and receptive to gender initiatives throughout. And so were a few other supportive male allies who were also instrumental in setting up IGES.
As IGES, we conducted a lot of gender sensitisation workshops with the entire institute community spanning students, faculty, and staff (including security staff and staff in hostels) and worked very hard to create customized interactive e-modules on the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH), which are now compulsory for students and faculty. We also revised our SH policy, brought in a lawyer, and strengthened the Internal Complaints Committee. Now, with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, we have an even greater push toward inclusivity on campus. The Office has IGES as a vertical under it. Other verticals deal with caste discrimination, LGBTQ issues, and accessible education.
The IGES, IIT Delhi’s gender unit, regularly conducts workshops for students, staff and faculty to build their understanding on social issues that cause multiple forms of inequalities. Source: IGES website
My study on the underperformance of students at IIT unexpectedly found that despite women’s [relatively low] ranking at IIT’s entrance tests, they excelled as a group while studying at the institute. This played a part in the instituting of the supernumerary seats scheme to meet the IITs’ goal of achieving 20 percent women students by 2022.
Given the skewed gender ratios, common spaces at IIT Delhi, whether real or virtual, were de facto male spaces. There is a virtual faculty forum, but I noticed that women hardly ever spoke on it. So, I started the all-women’s faculty email list, which later moved to an online community of women faculty at IIT Delhi. It has become a vibrant space for discussions on gender and STEM and networking among female faculty. Together with co-founding IGES, carving out such a space for women and a dedicated institute lecture on International Women’s Day, to be delivered by an eminent female scientist, are aspects of my legacy, if I can claim any.
We did get an award from DST but I’m disappointed because GATI seems to now be at a standstill.
Can you tell us about the mammoth effort of the gender audit for DST’s GATI project that you took up?
Work of this scale can only be a group effort, so I must commend all the faculty, students, and staff who worked intensively on this with me. The fine-grained gender-disaggregated data that was asked for in the self-assessment report was extremely difficult to collect since institutes do not maintain it, and it lies scattered in various offices. We produced a 200-page report based on analysing the quantitative data and qualitative data. The latter came from a campus gender climate survey, interviews, and focus groups covering the entire institute committee across intersections of gender, caste, and disability. Data and lived experiences cannot be ignored; the findings have provided the institute with deep insights into steps that can be taken to bridge gender gaps, address biases, and achieve greater diversity and inclusivity in a traditionally male institute.
We did get an award from DST, but I’m disappointed because GATI seems to be at a standstill now. On the plus side, the exercise and the report have resulted in sensitisation of the institute at several levels. Senior administrative positions and committees have better representation of women, and there is a sense of improvement in the overall gender climate. People are more aware of unconscious gender biases.
How have your own gendered experiences at IIT Delhi panned out over the years?
I’ll tell you about my early impressions. Our department is on the sixth floor, and when I joined, tea and lunch were served on the seventh floor. When I first went there, these male faculty members who were sitting there, talking animatedly, fell silent! Nobody said, “Come, join us.” Nobody seemed interested in meeting a new faculty member.
Initially, as a teacher, one is not so involved with the rest of the institute outside the department. This happens when you move up the hierarchy and become more involved in institutional affairs. I do recall being on an important committee early on, and as usual, given IITs’ faculty gender ratios, committees would be all men – and senior males 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 there are miles to go!
IITs were, and still are, a very, very male-dominated environment. And they were totally or willfully unaware of the poor student and faculty gender ratios 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, conscious bias at our STEM institutes. In this multidisciplinary five-year project funded by the Co-Impact Gender Fund, we want to rigorously understand the gender gaps and barriers to women’s inclusion in STEM institutes in India. The project aims to design a research-backed gender inclusion framework for such institutions. Towards this end, we are conducting various research studies along the life cycle of a hypothetical female scientist – from pre-entry to leadership. Our research on the effects and challenges of the supernumerary scheme, introduced to increase the percentage of girls in the BTech degree to 20%, shows that the goal has been met in all IITs. Female students continue to perform on par with the males; however, girls entering after the introduction of the scheme are often seen as having come on “girls’ quota,” leading to feelings of impostorism.
Our quantitative studies examine gender differences in exam-taking, leadership, faculty research productivity, and biases in gender attitudes at the workplace. My colleague Nandana Sengupta of IIT Delhi’s School of Public Policy has helmed this vertical. The qualitative studies, helmed by me, focus on the science aspirations of school girls, female students’ perceptions and experiences of the supernumerary scheme, gender gaps in the sciences, a lab ethnography, 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.
The STEMTheGap project follows the life cycle of a hypothetical female scientist, which includes the time before a woman enters STEM higher education, entry into STEM institutions, experience, retention, and progress toward leadership roles. Illustration by Jaya Dharmarajan.
I’ve just completed a study of women faculty in chemistry, at which I was quite shocked. I assumed those numbers would be better compared to engineering. Chemistry, which is considered to be a more female-friendly science, has the worst gender ratios in elite institutions, whether it’s IISc, the IITs, NITs, or high-ranked university departments such as Hyderabad and Jadavpur. At IIT Delhi, the department’s 60-year-old history had a maximum of three women as professors. For nearly fifteen years, there was no female faculty member. Then, for 16 years, they had one. One more was added subsequently, but unfortunately, the stalwart, Charusita Chakravarty, a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awardee, passed away of cancer, resulting in yet another lone female faculty member until 2023 when they recruited two more women, bringing the number to three again (8% of faculty). With stats like this, it is obvious that there are practices that are keeping women out. 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 overall. This is not just a leaky but a badly broken pipeline!
Note: An excerpt of this interview has appeared in The Hindu’s Frontline magazine. This article is part of ‘HumanIITies’, a special series co-produced by the STEMTheGap team at IIT Delhi and LabHopping Science Media Forum to highlight perspectives from the humanities at STEM institutes.
The featured image was prepared by Nandita Jayaraj using Canva and a photograph provided by Ravinder Kaur.
