From the first woman at IIT Bombay to a generation at IITs
The story traces how the journey of women at the IITs began with just one student at IIT Bombay and has grown to more than 4,000 women studying across the institutes in 2025, showing how access to technical education in India has slowly but steadily become more inclusive.
When Tejaswini Saraf arrived at IIT Bombay in the early 1960s she was a single figure against a sea of men. Her presence, rare then, notable now, is a reminder of how slowly change can begin and how hard it can be to scale.
Today, women make up a visible share of IIT classrooms, but the pace of change has slowed and gender balance remains far from complete.
Across several IITs the first women students appeared in the 1960s. Sushma Tewari was the first woman to join IIT Kanpur in 1962, setting another early marker for women in India’s elite technical institutes.
Numbers tell the rest of the story. After decades of small but steady gains, undergraduate female enrolment at the IITs rose sharply in the 2010s, helped by policy nudges such as supernumerary seats and concerted outreach.
Yet recent data show that progress has stalled: female intake at IITs now hovers near the low-twenties percentage, roughly one in five students, a level that has changed little in the past few years.
According to recent data on admissions across the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), female students now make up about 20 per cent of all undergraduate engineering seats, a share that has remained roughly stable in recent years even as total enrolment has grown.
In 2025, about 3,664 out of 18,188 students admitted were women, placing the overall female representation at around 20.15 per cent of the total intake.
IITs collectively host tens of thousands of students across their 23 campuses, with male students constituting the majority and women slowly increasing their presence in both engineering and interdisciplinary programmes.
The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) records rising female enrolment overall, yet the specialised, high-pressure pipeline that feeds the IITs, coaching, entrance exams, and early streaming into STEM, remains uneven in access.
That pattern helps explain why the IITs have more work to do to match broader gains in higher education.
WHY HAS MOMENTUM SLOWED? SEVERAL FACTORS CONVERGE:
Access to preparation. Quality coaching for the JEE remains expensive and concentrated in urban pockets. Young women from smaller towns and rural areas often face larger hurdles to reach top ranks.
Social expectations. Families may steer girls toward degrees perceived as “safer” or nearer home. Early career choices and household responsibilities still shape outcomes.
Campus climate and role models. While more women study and teach at IITs than before, visible senior women leaders and faculty remain relatively few. That affects both recruitment and retention.
The institutes and government have tried several fixes: outreach programmes, scholarships, bridge courses, girls-only mentoring and modest reservation-style measures such as extra seats.
These steps helped push female numbers into double digits and then into the high teens and low twenties. But experts and alumni say systemic change, affordable preparation, safer campuses, and stronger female leadership, will be needed to move beyond the plateau.
The story that began with lone figures like Tejaswini Saraf and Sushma Tewari is not finished.
The foundations are stronger than in the 1960s. The task now is to turn early gains into lasting balance, and to ensure that the doors opened half a century ago lead not to rare appearances but to full participation.