Karnataka - Bangalore

It is no longer a man’s world

— Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma

GIRL POWER: More girl students are stepping out of engineering colleges today.

Bangalore: When Nemichandra made up her in mind in 1976 to pursue a career in engineering, a barrage of advice came her way on the “inappropriateness” of her choice. It is not a field for women, they said, considering that they will have to do “men’s jobs” such as carpentry, foundry and machine shop.

“It was with self-doubt and apprehension that we entered the field of engineering,” recalls Nemichandra, who is now Deputy General Manager in the Helicopter R&D division of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. There were just three women in the Electronics Department in the National Institute of Engineering (NIE) in Mysore when she was studying. Two of them, including Nemichandra, came out with university ranks.

G.L. Shekhar, professor at NIE, recalls that the first mechanical engineer passed out of the institute in 1970 and went on to join National Aeronautics Limited in Bangalore. He says that the belief that engineering is “labour intensive” was what kept women away from the field for a long time.

Introduction of “white collar subjects” such as computer science and information technology changed this notion to a large extent. Today, any average college will have over 40 per cent girl students, with the numbers being particularly high among streams such as architecture. The boom in the IT (information technology) industry and the expansion of the job market on the whole has also hastened the process of more women entering the field of engineering. The department where Nemichandra studied now has 52 girl students.

According to a paper by Malathi Subramanian and Anupama Saxena presented in June 2007, there has been a steady increase in the enrolment of women in the engineering stream from one per cent in the 1970s to more than 15 per cent in the country now.

According to University Grants Commission figures of 1999-2000, 16.2 per cent of the enrolments in engineering colleges are by women.

Though Karnataka’s Department of Technical Education does not have a break-up on girls’ enrolment into engineering colleges, teachers in engineering colleges vouch for the fact that women constitute half the strength in most colleges. “They are an equal number in most streams,” says Indiramma, head of the Department of Computer Science Engineering in the BMS College of Engineering.

Part of the problem with women’s reluctance to enter engineering in the early years was also a lack of role models, says Nemichandra, also a well-known writer in Kannada.

“In all the texts that I had studied at school, there was never a mention of women scientists, women aviators, women inventors or women engineers,” she says.

This inspired her to take up research on the role of women science and technology.

“It took me a decade and a half of intense study and travel to various countries (including a remote village Nasca in Peru) to discover that there were women scientists right from the early times. There was a woman who flew an aircraft right in the first decade of 20th century. And there were many women inventors who never had any formal engineering training. Women overcame major obstacles to become scientists and inventors often at the expense of their personal lives,” she said.

It was only in the 1950s that the engineering colleges opened their doors for women, she adds.

But there are still some streams which are seen as male domain. As Prof. Shekhar points out, the number of women taking up mechanical engineering remains relatively low.

This is borne out by a study by P.P. Parikh and S.P. Sukhane (2002) which gives the break-up of women in various streams of engineering: civil engineering (19.7), computer science engineering (17.8), electrical engineering (16.1), electronics engineering (37.1) and mechanical engineering (9.3).

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