The headline figure for Indian academia in 2025 is around 33%: roughly one in three VIDWAN-registered faculty members is a woman. That number already represents a significant gender gap. But it conceals something starker underneath.
When you break the data down by broad discipline, two very different worlds emerge.
Female faculty share by broad discipline, 2025
Source: VIDWAN Expert Database, October 2025 scrape. Processed by STEMTheGap. Disciplines assigned using WoS subject area tags and department names. Figures reflect VIDWAN-registered faculty only.
In engineering and technology, 16% of registered faculty are women — about one in six. In humanities and social sciences, the figure is 48% — roughly half. That is a 32-point gap between two major disciplinary categories within the same university system, in the same year.
Medicine and health sits at 43%, reflecting the long history of women in Indian medicine — female enrolment in medical education has been high for decades, and that pipeline has fed into academic positions at a notably higher rate than in technical fields.
Science (physics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences) is at 29% — meaningfully above engineering, but still well below parity. Mathematics, counterintuitively, is slightly higher than science at 31%, which may reflect the structure of mathematics departments at arts and science colleges, where women's representation has historically been stronger than in research-intensive science departments.
Agriculture at 24% is lower than might be expected given that agricultural sciences have had relatively strong female participation in India historically. This likely reflects the composition of agricultural universities in the VIDWAN sample, which tend to be research-intensive institutions where the pipeline leakage effect is more pronounced.
The engineering number deserves particular attention. India's technical education system — the IITs, NITs, IIITs, and state engineering colleges — is one of the most important pipelines into industry and research. A 16% female faculty share means that the overwhelming majority of students in these institutions, who are already disproportionately male, are primarily taught by men. The effect on the next generation of who considers an academic career in engineering is not straightforward to quantify, but it is unlikely to be neutral.
One important caveat: disciplinary classification in this dataset uses WoS subject area tags combined with department names. Borderline cases — computational biology, biomedical engineering, environmental science — can fall into different categories depending on the department's primary affiliation. The boundaries are not perfectly clean, and the figures should be read as approximate rather than precise.
All figures are for VIDWAN-registered faculty. Disciplinary classification based on WoS expertise tags and department names. See the documentation for methodology detail.