The share of women among VIDWAN-registered faculty has risen from roughly 22% in 2010 to 33% in 2025. Across fifteen years, that is an eleven-point gain — real, sustained progress. But the trajectory tells a more complicated story than a single headline improvement suggests.
Female faculty share over time: overall vs STEM, 2010–2025
Source: VIDWAN Expert Database, October 2025 scrape. Processed by STEMTheGap. Pre-2015 data is thinner due to lower VIDWAN adoption rates; early growth partly reflects increasing registration rather than hiring changes. Figures reflect VIDWAN-registered faculty only.
The pace of change is slow. Averaging roughly 0.7 percentage points per year overall, and about 0.5 points per year in STEM. At this rate, overall parity — 50% female faculty — is several decades away. STEM parity is further still.
The STEM gap has not narrowed in relative terms. In 2010, STEM female share was about 8.6 points below the overall figure. In 2025, it is about 12.5 points below. Women have made gains in STEM in absolute terms — from 13% to 21% — but the overall system has improved faster. The STEM-specific problem has not been addressed by general progress; if anything, the two lines have diverged slightly.
Before 2015, treat the trend with caution. VIDWAN was launched in 2012 and adoption was uneven in the early years. Some of the apparent growth between 2010 and 2015 reflects more faculty registering on the platform, not necessarily more women being hired. From 2015 onward, coverage is denser and the trend is more reliable.
What could explain the gains after 2015? Several factors are plausible but difficult to separate. Reservation policies for women in faculty recruitment at some institution types. Growing female enrolment in postgraduate and PhD programmes feeding into the hiring pool. Targeted fellowships and returnship programmes for women who had career breaks. The data cannot identify which of these is driving the trend — only that the trend exists.
What should concern us about the pace? If the goal is genuine parity in how Indian academia looks — who teaches, who supervises PhD students, who sits on hiring committees — the current rate of change is not sufficient. At 0.7 points per year overall, it would take until the 2060s to reach 50%. The structural barriers — pipeline leakage at senior ranks, concentration of women in lower-paid disciplines, gaps in parental leave and institutional support — are not self-correcting at the speed the headline number might suggest.
The fifteen-year view gives reason for cautious optimism on the trend direction. It gives no grounds for complacency about the rate.
Early years (2010–2014) have lower coverage and should be read as indicative rather than precise. All figures are for VIDWAN-registered faculty. See the documentation for a full discussion of data limitations.