Bora notes that some people are wondering why there aren't more Indian (or Serbian) science bloggers. Bora links to an interesting post from Selva on this topic.
This is all very ironic to me because just two days ago I discovered the blog Nanopolitan (which, as it turns out, Selva has on his blogroll, so I could have discovered a lot sooner and by a lot less circuitous route than the one I followed). Nanopolitan is written by T. A. Abinandanan (Abi for short). Abi recently had an interesting series of posts on possible gender discrimination in India's top engineering institutions (TEI's) and in the entrance examination. See here and here for a start.
I am not anyways near as informed as I should be about gender issues in science and engineering outside the U.S. It was nice to encounter this discussion on Nanopolitan.
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Oh, my! Two links from ScienceBloggers in one day. It must be my lucky day!
Thanks, Zuska, for bringing up this issue of gender disparity in India's top engineering schools. That the disparity is huge is not in doubt: at our premier engineering schools (the seven Indian Institutes of Technology, IITs for short), for example, only 6 to 8 percent of the undergrad students are women. In comparison, women do about as well as men (or slightly better than them!) in high school exams (Irrespective of the cut-off one uses -- 80, 90, or even 95 percent marks in high school exams -- the number of qualified women is not much different from that of the number of qualified men). There is clearly a disconnect.
Unlike American schools, Indian schools do not take into account students' performance at high school. Instead, they take students **exclusively** through entrance exams. I have been arguing that the anti-women bias enters mainly through the entrance exams; a debate ensued when several others argued back saying that the entrance exams cannot be expected to remedy deep-rooted societal causes.
Thanks again for the link love.