You might have heard a lot of IITians, and now stand up comedians, joke about the fact that there are hardly girls in the most reputed engineering institute of India. Well, the trend seems to continue as it is, because girls’ participation doesn’t seem to be rising.
While girls are outshining boys in Class 12 board examination, it’s totally different story in IIT JEE. Not only is there far less amount of girls ranking high in the exams, the participation is also weak.
As unfortunate as it may sound, Ramya Narayanaswamy from Hyderabad, was the only girl this year to get a place among the top 100 rank holders in IIT JEE. Her rank was 35th.
Image source: ANI
The gender gap on IIT campuses can be estimated from the fact that only 33,358 girls registered for the exam compared to 1.38 lakh boys. A total of 43,318 boys accounted for 86% of the successful candidates this year, with 7,137 girls qualifying. Isn’t it sad?
Of the 11.86 lakh registered candidates for JEE Main 2017, three were transgenders. About 72.2% boys and 27.8% girls registered for the exam, both in the offline and online mode. in the final results, 79.2% boys cleared the exam as against 20.8% girls. Among the successful candidates, 93.2% boys made it to the top 1000 versus 6.8% girls and 90.7% boys were in the top 5000 as against just 9.3% girls.
About 9.56 lakh candidates appeared for the offline exam and among them, 6.92 lakh were boys and 2.64 lakh were girls. Of the 1.65 lakh candidates who appeared for the online exam, 1.25 lakh were boys and 40,385 were girls. Just 2.21 lakh candidates were successful, the boys at 1.75 lakh (79.2%) far ahead of the 46,160 (20.8%) girl candidates.
Now, this is alarming and tells us how much we need to push and motivate girls for higher studies. A little bit difference can be avoided, but such vast gap can’t be ignored at all. Without the growth of women, our country can’t be developed.
