IEEE Program Helps Girls In India See a Future In STEM

Roughly half the world’s population is female, but the STEM fields don’t reflect that. The 2024 U.N. Global Education Monitoring Report on gender found that about 35 percent of STEM college graduates were women. The proportion hasn’t increased much in more than a decade. When it comes to STEM careers, the percentage is even lower. Women made up about 28 percent of the global STEM workforce in 2024, according to the World Economic Forum. There are myriad factors for the discrepancy, including a lack of family support, some teachers encouraging only boys to pursue STEM subjects, and a shortage of female role models. But one force is at play long before college majors are ever considered: limited access to STEM-focused educational resources for preuniversity students. Especially for students in rural communities, the limited access curtails curiosity in STEM subjects before interest can take root. Although the lack of opportunity impacts boys and girls alike, when combined with other factors it can have an outsized effect on girls in some rural regions. IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi is one of the creators of the Women in Science, Engineering project. He is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.Rajiv Joshi One such place is rural India. The challenges of pursuing a STEM education—or any education at all—increase sharply as rural Indian girls move into their teen years. Social barriers including early marriage, traditional gender roles, and familial expectations for financial support contribute to girls’ dropping out of school, according to the Mahadev Maitri Foundation, a nongovernment organization focused on childhood education in underdeveloped areas. Dropout rates for girls spike between the ages of 11 to 14, according to the foundation. The trend is something IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi and IEEE Senior Member Rajesh Zele want to change. A shared passion to keep rural Indian girls from dropping out of school and on paths to STEM careers led them to launch the Women in Science, Engineering (WiSE) project. “Talent is universal, but opportunity is not,” Joshi says. “WiSE is one way to expand opportunities.” Bringing the WiSE vision to life Joshi, vice president of industry for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Zele is a professor of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), in suburban Mumbai. They presented their proposal for the three-year initiative to the society’s board of governors in 2022 and received a grant of US $80,000. The framework WiSE was a five-day, hands-on learning program held on the IIT-B campus. Starting in 2023, it ran for three years and was held during the last week of March. A new cohort of 160 to 200 girls from rural and tribal areas in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka attended each year. The event was divided into two parts: hands-on learning through Break-Make-Program (BMP) experiences and presentations by influential female Indian role models. Zele, project manager Arti Auti, several IIT-B faculty members, and about 70 student volunteers from the institute oversaw the program. Selecting the first cohort With funding secured, Zele and his team on the ground in India got busy selecting attendees for the inaugural 2023 class. They reached out to administrators at 68 schools in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Although the two states are among the most urbanized in the country, each has vast rural areas where educating teen girls competes with early marriage and familial support pressure. Teachers identified girls with high scores in mathematics and science, and community leaders recommended students who could benefit from the program. Then outreach to their parents began. The adults were required to commit their own time, not just grant permission for their daughters to attend. They participated in quarterly online meetings that included the girls’ teachers, IIT-B student mentors, and other program volunteers after the week concluded. The check-ins held parents accountable for supporting their daughters’ continuing school attendance. The commitment to join the meetings was to last for at least four years after their daughter’s program participation ended. Hands-on learning is key Participants stayed in one of the institute’s dormitories for the week and attended sessions held Monday through Friday. They worked together in small teams to build things rooted in STEM concepts. The teams were supervised by Arti, IIT-B faculty, and student volunteers. “The idea behind BMP,” Joshi says, “was to give the girls an opportunity to take a gadget apart, then rebuild it, perfect it, or come up with a totally new idea.” The sessions included working with bioluminescence and bacteria (introducing participants to biology and microbiology), learning about autonomous underwater vehicles, and bu

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