Rooting out gender imbalance should be the major focus of science policy 2020. Comment (200 Words)
Refer - Financial Express
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 4 years
KEY POINTS
· Despite having one of the best showings globally on women’s representation in undergraduate science education, just 13.9% of the total of 280,000 researchers holding
· STEM jobs in India are women, a 2019 analysis by Unesco shows. Contrast this with China, where women account for nearly 40% of the total pool of researchers.
· One of the reasons is the drying pipeline towards the doctoral end of STEM higher education in the country. As AISHE 2018-19 data shows, while women equal men in strength at the undergraduate level in the sciences, they outnumber men (3:2) at the post-graduate level.
· The pipeline for women in STEM research, thus, seems to thin out after PG. A 2017 NITI Aayog report shows that just 20% of the research and administrative staff in a select group of institutions, including the IITs, IISERs and NITs, are women.
· Some other factors behind the low representation of women in STEM employment, as documented across the globe through research, are unequal pay, dual responsibilities of managing home and work impacting career growth and becoming a serious disincentive, etc.
· Indian women in STEM have managed to hold their own in terms of published work despite their low strength in employment—a study analysing a sample of 27,000 papers published by Indian researchers in 2017, in the Journal of Informetrics, found that there was one woman author for every three male authors, across 186 streams.
· The science policy 2020, focusing on facilitating on women for STEM employment through measures such as more promotion opportunities, leadership positions and support facilities such as crèches solves part of the problem.
