Kamala Sohonie graduated from Bombay University in 1933, at the top of her class. She followed her father and uncle’s footsteps to continue her education at their alma mater, the prestigious IISc in Bengaluru. However, unlike her father and uncle, Kamala’s request for admission was dismissed. CV Raman, the then-Director, according to the book Dispersed Radiance, proclaimed “I am not going to take any girls in my institute.” What happened next is history. 21-year-old Kamala, instead of retreating, confronted the revered Nobel laureate and staged a protest outside his office until he relented, albeit with conditions.
How much have things changed at the hiring level since 1933? It depends on whom you ask. In 2015, two professors from Cornell University created a flutter with the results of their survey. Wendy M Williams and Stephen J Ceci used their survey to conclude that gender bias in hiring no longer exists in the US; not only that, women actually had an edge. Employers, according to the survey, were twice as likely to prefer women to men. The paper said that the greatest harm to women considering careers in academic science was not discrimination, but their own decision to not apply. It concluded:
Efforts to combat formerly widespread sexism in hiring appear to have succeeded . . . The perception that STEM fields continue to be inhospitable male bastions can become self-reinforcing by discouraging female applicants, thus contributing to continued underrepresentation, which in turn may obscure underlying attitudinal changes.
According to Williams and Ceci, the playing field had successfully been levelled. These claims were widely reported by the likes of Nature News and The Economist. And why not? The paper was stating something positive that seemed to be backed by data. Moreover, if true, this also meant employers no longer needed to struggle for gender equity; after all, they were not to blame for the gender gap. In an opinion piece that followed the publication, Williams and Ceci said:
The low numbers of women in math-based fields of science do not result from sexist hiring but rather from women’s lower rates of choosing to enter math-based fields in the first place, due to sex differences in preferred careers and perhaps to lack of female role models and mentors.
Results like these are just the evidence needed by scientific employers to support the dominant perception that institutions are already doing as much as they can to hire women. And this is, in fact, the impression we get when we speak to authorities of Indian science. If we investigated the gender gap by speaking only to these big bosses, we may have concluded that the times of hiring bias have passed, that bigoted CV Raman-esque attitudes to women who apply for scientific jobs no longer exist, and that the gender gap is the result of women’s own choices. Therefore, there is no point in haranguing employers in the name of gender equality.
Instead, let’s be positive, we might have advised. Let’s accept that the battle is won, at least from the systemic side of things and shift the focus on fixing the women and their mindsets. Or even better, let’s just accept the gender gap in science as an outcome of “sex differences”. All is well.
However, early on in our lab-hopping journey, we decided that we would not be interviewing just the occupants of the ivory towers. We knew that an honest picture of Indian science could only be painted through the experiences of the “everyday” scientist. And these experiences made it clear to us that gender bias in hiring persists, and it has taken on various insidious avatars.
It did not take long for gaps in the Williams–Ceci study to be exposed. In subsequent commentaries, it was accused of having fallen prey to the “superstar problem”, a term coined by American feminist legal scholar Joan C Williams and psychologist Jessi L Smith. In their response to the study, they argued that equality for “superstar” women scientists was not the same as equality for all women.
It may be that women scientists with Ivy League degrees, with publications in Nature and Science and women Nobel laureates are treated on par with men, but what about the others – those women in science who do good research but don’t have such exalted credentials. Are they being hired equally as their male counterparts? The stories we heard from the ground in India suggest overwhelmingly that the answer is no.
Those running our scientific institutions would have us believe that there is nothing guiding their decisions apart from the pursuit of excellence. If this is true, one may very well wonder why Indian science is still underperforming. Even much-revered scientists like Bharat Ratna awardee CNR Rao have lamented that Indian laboratories are “rife with mediocrity”.
This raises the question of whether employers truly are hiring based on excellence alone. And if so, who defines what being excellent is? Are these standards for hiring uniform across all axes, such as gender and caste? Our conversations have suggested that to be hired, women are expected to have not just top-notch subject knowledge, but also confidence, connections, and an agreeable personality. These are the traits that make a potential candidate a “superstar” in the eyes of an employer. When they detect such a superstar, it may indeed be that the person is welcomed and treated very well, irrespective of their gender.
Men, however, seem to be judged more leniently. Defects in personality ranging from rudeness to predatory behaviour are tolerated (sometimes even glorified) if their science is good. Even faulty science may be excused if he has the right connections and talks the talk.
The question is this: are as many mediocre women being hired as mediocre men? In the words of American feminist Bella Abzug: “We don’t want so much to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.”
We repeatedly encountered evidence of a double standard during hiring but it hit us most starkly on one bright day on the west coast of the country in 2019. We had multiple interviews lined up and the first was with Meenakshi, a senior scientist who was the Director of Research at her university. After regaling us with stories of her accomplishments, she added that she has felt treated better in India than abroad. She said, “Here in India, women don’t have to be equal, just 75 per cent as good. If a man and a woman are equally good for a job or award, the woman will be selected. We should get rid of this idea that women don’t get awards. Maybe it’s time to introspect and think that someone else is better.”
Such questioning of the merit of women is something that is implied very often but most bosses these days avoid saying it out loud for fear of sounding politically incorrect. We were intrigued to meet a woman scientist herself who believed that women were treated better in science than men. A few minutes later, we were further taken aback to hear Meenakshi add: “Sometimes, if there is a position for which a guy and a girl apply, I’ll take the guy. Because I already have so many women. They will have to run away at 4.30 pm to catch a bus and go home because the baby is waiting. If it’s a man, I can tell them to stay back and finish up the work. In India, being a lady comes with a lot of responsibilities. Women are good to hire for nine-to-four jobs but for research . . . you know, I never used to go home before 9 pm. It’s a research institute so I have to look at it this way.”
The belief that men are more suitable for research is sadly common among many bosses of Indian science. They are able to insist that women have it easy, even whilst explicitly discriminating against them. We found Meenakshi’s views jarring and tried our best to make sense of it. We decided that perhaps she was fooled by her own experience as a superstar scientist. Having been treated well most of her scientific life thanks to her own accomplishments and her academic pedigree, she had wrongly assumed that all women have the same experience. She was misconstruing equality among superstars as equality for all like Ceci–Williams, while actively discriminating against them herself.
Excerpted with permission from Lab Hopping: Women Scientists in India, Nandita Jayaraj and Aashima Dogra, Penguin India.