In 2025, women make up around 24% of assistant professors registered on VIDWAN across Indian universities. At the professor level — the same institutions, the same year — the figure is 16%. Eight percentage points lost across two career transitions. Researchers call this the leaky pipeline: not a barrier at entry, but a steady drip of women out of the system as seniority increases.
Sample:
The pattern holds across every institution type we looked at, but the severity varies considerably.
IITs and NITs are at the sharp end of this problem. At IITs, only around 8% of professors are women — roughly one in twelve. The pipeline loss from assistant to professor level is about ten percentage points. That is not a rounding error. It represents a structural pattern in who gets promoted and who doesn't.
Central and state universities fare better in absolute terms — around 22–27% of professors are women — but the pipeline effect is still visible at every level of the hierarchy. The drop from assistant to professor is ten to fourteen points regardless of institution type.
It is worth being precise about what this data can and cannot tell us. A pipeline leakage figure measured at a single point in time is not the same as tracking a cohort of women through their careers. We are not observing the same people at different stages — we are observing who happens to be in each rank in 2025. Some of the gap reflects women entering academia more recently (and therefore being concentrated at junior ranks), not only attrition at senior levels.
That said, the size of the gap — and the consistency of the pattern across institution types — is difficult to explain away. Women have been entering Indian academia in meaningful numbers for decades. If the gap were purely a cohort composition effect, it would have narrowed significantly by now.
The leaky pipeline is not unique to India. It is documented in virtually every academic system with available data. But the severity in India's elite technical institutions — where the professor-level figure is under 10% — puts them among the more extreme cases globally.
All figures are for VIDWAN-registered faculty and should be read as lower bounds on actual representation. Institutions with lower VIDWAN registration rates may skew results. See the documentation for a full account of the data's limitations.