Women in Physics: An Indian Perspective

Understanding nature, which is what physics is all about, is a global human endeavor. However, for a variety of reasons, women are conspicuously underrepresented in physics. In the new millennium, it is certainly important to correct this underrepresentation—both for the sake of the women, who should have the same opportunities and resources to realize and fulfill all they desire to accomplish in their lives, as well as for the sake of physics, which must draw on the full potential of humankind to solve its myriad questions. Within the Indian context, the participation of women in public life has been quite high. Even before independence, thanks to an enlightened Indian leadership, especially that of Mahatma Gandhi, both men and women have been involved in the freedom struggle. This led to the emergence of strong women leaders in the subcontinent. Indian women have held most political positions of importance, such as prime minister, chief ministers of various states, and leaders of legislatures. Women have also held positions of prominence in the judiciary and in other professions. However, India is a country of many contrasts. Along with women of very high levels of accomplishment, it also has problems such as high levels of female illiteracy, female infanticide, and dowry deaths. This leads to unusual statistics. For instance, although almost half the women in India are illiterate, roughly a third of science graduates are women and a reasonable fraction of them stay on in science. It is interesting that a survey of all the working scientists in the country reveals that, unlike in the West, there is very little perception at either school or college level that women cannot do physics and math. The more standard reasons for dropping out seem to be family or marriage related. It becomes difficult for women to cope with the simultaneous time demands of their gender roles and their professional commitments. While training up to the Ph.D. level puts heavy demands on the time and commitment of women vis-a-vis the demands of society, which expects them to fulfill the commitments of marriage and raising a family during the crucial years of training, postgraduate degrees in science are common, and are even encouraged by parents. Moreover, jobs such as college teaching or working in scientific establishments after a Master's degree are perceived as highly desirable and prestigious for women. However, in graduate school and beyond, the dropout percentage of women becomes far more significant. Whether or not a woman completes a Ph.D. and/or pursues postdoctoral fellowships is completely dependent on her marital status, the employment of the spouse, and family support. The women who go ahead for a Ph.D., postponing marriage, often marry other students. This leads to the problem of finding two jobs in the same place. So either the couple has to compromise on the career of one of them (usually that of the woman), or end up with many years of a commuting marriage. Moreover, most jobs in academics require many years of postdoctoral training. This again entails commuting marriages, postponing or coping with the additional problems of child-bearing, and dealing with a great deal of family pressure. Even after all this effort, suitable academic jobs are difficult to get. Those who do manage to get suitable jobs along with their spouses still have to deal with problems of child-rearing, given the fact that suitable day-care centers and creches with educated caregivers are still relatively new concepts in India. In spite of these handicaps, women physicists in India form roughly 10% of the physics faculty in all of the universities, and have significant presence as researchers in the various government institutions and research laboratories. This is a pretty impressive achievement. Additionally, many women physicists have been working on frontier problems at the international level. In particle physics, Indian women physicists were involved in the top quark discovery and theorists have written highly cited and useful papers in phenomenology and quantum field theory. In fact, one of the most highly cited particle