Woman Interrupted | Women in Science – Episode 38

Women Uninterrupted spoke to Dr. D. Indumathi, a senior physicist who was part of the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), on how the glass ceiling for women is more a social construct, and not just workplace bias.

Host: Anna Thomas 

Guest: Dr. D. Indumathi

Title music: Maya Dwaraka

Wingwoman: Anuja Singh

From Chennai to Zanzibar

Prof Preeti Aghalayam, Institute Chair Professor at the Dept. of Chemical Engg, IIT Madras (IITM), is the first woman director to have ever led an IIT campus. From Zanzibar, she spoke to Anna Thomas about the progress of the Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions (GATI), a Dept of Science & Technology initiative.

”35% of IITM Zanzibar students are women, and most of the local staff are women” – Prof Preeti Aghalayam (Pic location: IITM Zanzibar campus)

WU: Prof Aghalayam, you have been the nodal officer for GATI, the initiative in which IIT Madras has been a pilot institution since 2022. Can you tell us the key points about the gender equity charter framed by GATI?

Prof Aghalayam: IIT Madras signed the Gender Equity charter in April 2021, and reinforced its commitment to providing an equitable work environment to all. Inclusion of diversity of experiences and perspectives in decision making and leadership bodies of the institute was clearly mentioned. Another interesting aspect of the charter was a recognition of the challenges faced by women in science in general and our institution in particular.

WU: Prof, you have stated that the fact that Zanzibar is the first IIT campus abroad is more important than you having been the first woman to head an IIT.

The fact remains that women are a minority in the IITs – about 12 per cent women faculty at IIT Madras, for instance, as of 2023. Could you give us a brief overview of the plans that are being implemented as an outcome of GATI to improve STEM gender ratios?

Prof Aghalayam: The gender numbers and inclusion experiences at IIT Madras are improving. Several departments including Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biotechnology have onboarded several young women faculty. Our new department, Medical Science and Technology, is also worthy of mention here. Moreover, the involvement of women faculty in several decision-making bodies of the institution is now evident. Many of these shifts are done mindfully and are likely the impact of GATI. As we mentioned in the GATI submission, our efforts to improve the campus experience of women faculty and PhD scholars, not just at IIT Madras, but beyond, through our series of Women Leading IITs programmes, are growing in scope and impact. The women’s forum continues to leave a mark with active initiatives for women staff, faculty and student groups.

On a personal note, being the founding Director-in-charge of an IIT abroad has been a remarkable experience. It has been an honor to represent IIT Madras and India, in Africa. Our Zanzibar campus is our pride and the relationships forged in our short time here are incredibly meaningful for our team of faculty. The efforts are already bearing fruit with the acknowledgements of the skills and academic prowess of our students. And yes, 35% of IITM Zanzibar students are women, and most of the local staff are women!

Vodcast Transcript

Host: On episode 38 of Women Uninterrupted, I have with me Dr D. Indumathi. She is one of India’s very few women physicists, and she is known for her work on neutrinos. Welcome, Dr. Indumathi.

OK, doctor…I am going to tell you that you’re famous for saying that there is no glass ceiling anymore…

Dr Indumathi: I do believe this, but there is a context in that the glass ceiling is something that is set by society. I don’t think it is set by the boss – that’s what I really meant. If I wish to do research,

I think nothing will stop me from getting to the top if I am good enough, so especially – particularly not the fact that I am a woman – but I feel that the problems that women face are social. They are imposed from outside – outside the work environment because obviously it’s true that there are much fewer women in positions of power than men, and the reason for this, I think, is social and not really within the workspace – bias in the workspace, I think, especially in research, in academia – and let me talk about physics or the STEM sciences, because I’m more familiar with them – I have not seen this bias myself, and I think the constraints are actually imposed from outside. This is what I mean. I think it should always be read within this context and not as a generally true statement.

Dr. D. Indumathi: “If you’ve taken a two- or three-year break, the world has moved on.”

Host: Yeah, we have achieved nearly 50:50 gender parity rate in STEM graduates, and we had the highest STEM enrolment compared to the US and even compared to the UK.

But where we are lagging – that leaky pipeline – is in representation in the workforce and leadership and research roles. So – why do we need women? Why are we even talking about it? Why do we need women in fundamental science?

Host: Yeah, we have achieved nearly 50:50 gender parity rate in STEM graduates, and we had the highest STEM enrolment compared to the US and even compared to the UK.

But where we are lagging – that leaky pipeline – is in representation in the workforce and leadership and research roles. So – why do we need women? Why are we even talking about it? Why do we need women in fundamental science?

Dr Indumathi: I think it’s not a question of need. I would like to see it from the other point of view. When I talk to children, and I talk to children a lot, I think it’s important to tell them that the role model for a young girl – maybe just finishing school and wanting to get a career advice as to what kind of course you should do in college – is not something that you do whiling away the time while you’re looking to be married and settling down, which was the case maybe, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, but to look for opportunities where you can showcase your talents in some kind of a job environment. The job need not be a steady salary paying thing; it need not be a government position which people used to always look forward to so many decades ago, but something where your talents can be showcased, where you feel fulfilled in your life’s work.

If your bent is towards science, then you should actually have the opportunity to do that science. I think that….and if your interests are in literature or in art, whatever, you should be able to do what you want, and this goes for men and women, and especially I think the women, because there is still a mindset among certain sections of society that the role of a woman…ultimately you study well so that you have a better biodata, so to speak, on the marriage market, and this is something that is really unfortunate. I hope it will change very fast.

And I hope that women will also understand that their life is as much to be lived as the men’s. And it is not us versus them, but all of us together. I think that is really what I would like to highlight – that all of us deserve to live the lives that we find fulfilling.

Host: Would you think that not having gender parity in research actually skews research findings?

Dr Indumathi: I have recently retired, so I have had a long career in physics, and definitely I do see the difference. People are becoming a little more sensitive about this issue, but I don’t think that I would really like to be that token woman in a committee.

I want to be in the committee because I deserve to be in the committee, not because yeah, it has three men, so we must have at least two women, right? So, and I think my absolute, whatever, heaven would be if people just are on committees or in positions of power because of their abilities and their talent, and not because of their gender or their background or some other things that you tick off or cross out. But I think that sensitivity is definitely there. Of course, there’s a lot of people…there’s like a kind of pushback also. It’s going to happen because the more we push, the more there is a pushback. Newton said that himself. But this is something that I do see changing. It has changed quite a bit. But as I said, I don’t quite approve of the tokenism that is also appearing. I think that it is good that men are getting more sensitive about this issue because it’s a very complex issue. It’s not easy to solve.

There’s generations of data behind us that we have to slowly overcome, and certainly I don’t think we have to give the message, which will be very wrong, that it will be men versus women that, you know, the women get the positions which the men therefore will not get, because that is certainly, you know, guaranteed to cause friction between the two, and you will have more and more people who are going to be resentful about women coming into these positions of power, of authority, of responsibility.

So, I think it should not be adversarial, right?

Host: You just retired from the (Indian) Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, where you had done your PhD – in the last century, actually. You are editing a children’s magazine called Jantar Mantar.

Dr Indumathi: That’s right.

Host: And you have also been involved in programmes like at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research on encouraging girls and women to enter STEM. Can you tell us a little more about that programme?

Dr Indumathi: Not just TIFR. At IMSc, I think I’m very proud of the fact that for the last 30 odd years, we have been continually engaged in outreach programmes. We also specially target, for example, Tamil medium children and children. Many things which are so easily accessible to urban children are not so readily available to rural semi-urban children, which is what Jantar Mantar, the children’s science magazine, actually focuses on.

This is one issue. The other thing is that I think there is so much information out there. I think we are in an age where we cannot turn back the clock. AI is with us. We have to deal with it.

But on the other hand, if you look at the amount of material – when I was a child, if I had access to this much material, I would have been in seventh heaven, right? So, it’s really a matter of being able to cull from among this ocean of information.

I think programmes that address children should actually address this issue. I tell them about what is interesting, what is new, what is different. And then I come to where science plays a role. Today, I am talking to you through technology, right? There’s electronics. And that’s because, I mean, little more than 100 years ago, the electron was discovered as a matter of curiosity, as a basic science research programme, which had no potential use. And today, you cannot think of even electricity without electrons.

So, all discoveries in science eventually translate into engineering and technology, and if you want India to be a first-world nation and our people to do well, have good jobs, and be enjoying a certain level or a certain quality of life, then we cannot just import this technology always; we must build it from within us.

Our whole idea of trying to build that lab in India, the underground neutrino lab (INO), was to have a very big centre where children, students from maybe plus two college, undergraduate, postgraduate, can actually come work with their hands, learn to make things. This is, I think, the core or the what I believe in really, and many of our entrance exams don’t test for this.

And we have to, so that people see…because people use a lot of technology, but in school they are afraid of science and maths…but without that science and maths, there is no technology. And this chasm between the two is because we do not really take our lab work seriously. We do not take experimentation seriously. We do not take hands-on work seriously. And I think this is something that I would really like to see change. And I am very positive. I think things are happening, but at a very slow level.

And I would like to take this opportunity to tell people this is, I think, something that we lack. Instead of importing stuff, we should actually make our own. And the more we dirty our hands, the more we understand how things work – the better we can make them.

Host: So, this was when you were a senior scientist at the INO, the India-based Neutrino Observatory. You’re talking about that project which has been stalled.

Dr Indumathi: Yes, that’s true. But I mean, I think that a lot came out of it. Many students were trained to do, they were taught both theoretical physics as well as experimentation, a lot of, you know, computational techniques, simulations. Many of them are working at international

experiments, they’re doing really well. And it’s really a pity that we lost all of them, this manpower or human resources, because our lab could not come up. And the other thing I would like to say is that there’s a little skewness. I mean, there are about 1000 universities in India, but funding majorly goes to very few of them.

And this actually reflects in the quality of students that we have. I see a lot of students who are passionate about science, about physics, but simply cannot make it through our entrance exams,

This is how we lose really good people, or people who are just very good with their hands, but may not be able to pass entrance exams, right?

Host: Talking about losing people, I want to come back to attrition from the workforce by women. And you said that, well, not having household chores as their main responsibility would be a great impetus for women, because a PhD is not just a nine to five job. So, how can…what would your message be to women in STEM who are, well, trying to do their traditional rearing roles?

Dr Indumathi: Well, the poor women don’t often have a choice – not just women in STEM – I think women everywhere who are trying to hold on a job in India. It is still the norm that women also do the housework when they go home.

I don’t think I would like a utopia where no one does any job at all. It’s not possible. The housework is there, it has to be done, children are there, have to be looked after. But I think more of a sharing basis, you know, where the man takes equal responsibility for…like, I have been very lucky in my life, right? I have had a partner who has always shared things fifty-fifty so that we can both do the research that we are interested in.

This kind of a mindset is now very, very, very slowly percolating into our system. It’s a very small fraction of people who live like this. More or less, the woman is expected to finish all the household work, and then if she has extra time on her hands to go out and work. The converse of this is also true. By the way, I have been hearing from some psychologist friends of mine that, you know, a woman gets married – a typical conservative woman, maybe – gets married around twenty-three, twenty-four, has a couple of children few years after that. By the time she is in her mid or late 40s, the children have, you know, presumably written IIT, JEE or NEET or something, and they have left home, right?

And here she is, just not just hardly middle-aged, nobody at home, no career, no other interest in life, because she’s literally spent it on bringing up her children, and depression follows, clinical depression follows, and many, many, many middle-class women in India are now facing this; don’t even understand what is happening to them.

And I tell this whenever I go and talk to – especially 12th Standard children among the girls over there – that a job is not just because you have to earn money. You have to earn money. You have to enjoy your passion. But it’s also something that you have to do to keep yourself employed. Because today’s nuclear family means that you don’t do more than two hours of work at home a day. What do you do the rest of the time? You have to keep your brain cells working, right?

And that I think is also a very, very important consideration when you talk about women – may not be directly in STEM, may not be like, technically job holding, but to actually, there are now so many possibilities, so many opportunities, freelancing, all kinds of things that you should just go out and try and do and not just decide that I’m going to stay at home and not expand my horizons beyond that. I think that is something, especially in today’s world that young girls have to be really aware of – that you should not end up at the age of forty-five or forty-nine and not know what to do with the rest of your life.

Host: So, as a takeaway, let’s finish with the government schemes, especially by the Department of Science and Technology. They have the Kiran Scheme, they have the Women Scientist Scheme. Is there anything you can add to that?

Dr Indumathi: I do know, in fact, in our own institute, some women who’ve had a break in research because of childbirth come back to research through these schemes, but to be very honest it needs tremendous willpower – and in fact, I know of a very successful case in particular – but it needs tremendous willpower to come back to research, because research is extremely unforgiving. If you’ve taken a two- or three-year break, the world has moved on, you know, it’s not waiting for you to catch up.

And to come back after two years of being rusty is extremely hard. But I think what I would like to appreciate, actually, about these schemes is that, again, there is this awareness. There is this sensitivity that, yes, women have it hard because of various social considerations. So, this is an extra impetus to try to bring them back into the mainstream. And I’m really appreciative of that. But as far as the individuals are concerned, I think it’s very challenging to come back to research because that kind of a break is really, really tough to overcome because it’s not just a matter of keeping up with what is the latest, but after finding out what is happening in that field to actually go back to research and do something new and original, I think makes it very hard. But the fact that such schemes are coming up, the fact that there’s a special orientation or a focus on women in science, women faculty in science, young girls in science, I think this is something very commendable. I think I’m really happy that this is happening. It’s always been true that there are a lot of women, even in BSc and MSc, even in PhD. So, the reason they fall out and don’t really have careers matching that of men is, as I said, socially. And that is something that all of India should address, the men as well as the women. And that, I hope, will happen soon and that we see a huge change in our social fabric.

Host: Thank you. So that was Dr. D. Indumathi, theoretical physicist, just retiring from work, but never retiring. And advocating for girls in labs, not just classrooms. Signing off from this episode of Women Uninterrupted, a podcast brought to you by The Hindu.

Dr Indumathi: Thank you very much.