Friday, December 30, 2005

Gender Progress At IITs

Via Times of India, Anjali Joseph reports: 'Women at IIT an endangered species'

This is unfortunately not news, except for this quote from an IIT Mumbai student:

"There are 34 girls and over 500 boys in our year," says first year civil engineering student Vidushi Jain.

Well, Vidushi -- if it helps at all, you live in times of great advance. When this blogger was at IIT, his class of 250 or so had all of 2 women!!

6 comments:

libertarian said...

The article should be titled "Women at IIT - a roaring comeback".

This may be just my perception - but women performed disproportionately better than their numbers. Thoughts? Perceptions?

froginthewell said...

One reason I think for why there aren't so many girls at IIT is that not as many parents send their children to coaching classes ( particularly to "factories" like Kota where many boys from outside the city come just to study for IIT ). Moreover I think girls tend to be more sincere to what is taught in their class - which means more of their time is spent studying for the 12th standard examination, leaving lesser time for JEE preparation ( the same thing explains why if you look purely in terms of CGs they seem to do "disproportionately well" ). If you however look at real knowledge, for instance the tendency to become an open source hacker etc., I don't see any difference ( as the whole business seems entirely uncorrelated with the JEE rank ). But these days JEE is being diluted and is much closer to or probably as un-challenging as the 12th standard exam, and you see more and more girls being admitted into IITs and also securing top ranks.

On a similar note, south zone performance dropped drastically
in '98. Before that IITM CS cutoff was around AIR 50 or so, in '98 it was 106, in '99 it was 128 and so on.

The slimes article is pure nonsense - girls are only increasing in number in IITs.

Anonymous said...

froginthewell:
for the iit illitereates
CGs? CS cut off? AIR?
thanks

froginthewell said...

Let me clarify on one point : when I said JEE is getting diluted and CBSE-ish, and that hence more girls were getting in; I did not mean that girls are less intelligent. I was only saying that since the dependence on Kota-like factories decreased a factor that was giving boys some advantage started having a diminished effect.

CG : Cumulative Grade Point Average ( sorry; anyway I think this is only in IITM, others use GP or so? ).

AIR is All India Rank. CS cut off is the minimum rank you had to have so as to get into Computer Science, the branch that then had the greatest demand.

Rohit De said...

Deeply embarassed about the self promotion but I couldn't resist linking my similiarly themed post.

http://eastwords.blogspot.com/2005/12/techie-boys-fantasies-and-women.html

ankan said...

not much of a progress over the years. the ratios have remained more or less same over the years.

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