Take a look around you. Women, women everywhere. Be it the Xth standard merit list, university rank holders, company’s senior management or medal winners at international meets. Where are the men? Are they failing to keep up?

It would certainly seem so. The list is formidable and endless... There’s Dr Indira Parikh, first woman dean of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, the country’s best-known management school. Then there’s Dr Kamal Vilku, first Indian woman, who at 51, travelled to Antarctica and stayed in the frozen continent for 16 months.

There’s also the late astronaut Kalpana Chawla; highest-ranking IPS officer Kiran Bedi, now appointed to the UN; Everest climber Bachendari Pal; sky diver Rachael Thomas; shehnai player Bageshwari Qamar; tabla player Anuradha Pal ... All firsts. Women who’ve taken on tough challenges in traditionally male-dominated fields. And have met them better.

STORMING MALE BASTIONS
It starts right at the school level. In the standard XII results in 2002 CBSE exams, for instance, the percentage of girls who passed was 80.86 as compared to that of boys at 70.91. “By and large, girls are doing much better because they concentrate more on their studies and are more mature than boys of that age,” says Pavnesh Kumar, Controller of Examinations, Central Board of Secondary Education, Delhi.

In rural Maharashtra, boys are often pulled out from school to lend a helping hand, because not only is their education not free, their performance is much poorer than the girls’.

The story continues as they go up the professional ladder. Says Sangeeta Shroff, chairperson, Department of Fashion Design, National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Gandhinagar, “While the ratio of women and men studying fashion design, used to be 3:1, say even a couple of batches ago, today the ratio is 6:1. This trend is discernible not just in fashion design, but also in garment manufacturing technology, which is as technical as it gets, or even accessory design.”

When Shroff graduated in 1982 in visual communications (a very unconventional discipline for women, then) from the National Institute of Design (NID), there was probably a handful of women on campus. ‘’Today, there is a discernible 60:40 ratio in favour of women as opposed to 50:50, even a few years ago,’’ says Maneesha Singh, coordinator, Furniture and Interior Design, NID.

While both premier fashion and design institutions do not have a grading system, the fact that all awards in categories of garment design in 2002 at NIFT (be it garment construction or creative collection) were bagged by women, speaks for itself. “Fashion design is no longer about sitting at home or in pretty boutiques and having garment lines,” adds Shroff. It is about “working on shop floors, meeting delivery deadlines of exporters in big garment houses.” So much for the notion that women tend to, or ought to, opt for relatively undemanding career choices.

Science is another hallowed male bastion that few women have ventured into. Dr Indira Nath has not only ventured there but has successfully destroyed the conventional notion that women don’t have what it takes to withstand the rigours of research. She has received a Padmashri, the L’Oreal UNESCO 2002 Award for Women in Science, has published papers in prestigious science journals like ‘The Lancet’ and ‘Nature’, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Union Cabinet. Moreover, she helped start a department of biotechnology at the AIIMS in 1986. Dr Nath is happy to note that unlike a decade ago, 70 to 80 per cent of researchers in biology today are women.

Where the divide is perhaps most pronounced is in the area of sports and physical endurance. Yet, as top athlete Sunita Rani points out, “Most medals in the last few years have been brought home by women, especially within the 15-30 year age group.” According to her, women are more dedicated and hardworking on the training ground than their male counterparts.

G Sree Vidhya, the CEO and driving force behind Dialtone Hotline Services, a security firm in Chennai, which trains men and women security officers, observes: “I think women can be as good at this job as men and will only get better, mainly because they are more committed. As the head of a security agency, I would say it can be risky. You have to be mentally tough, and there’s no reason why a woman cannot be as tough, if not tougher than a man.”

Against All Odds