Parents feel engineering is not suitable for girls

Hyderabad: The gender ratio in engineering colleges, according to the annual report on higher education and universities, is about as skewed as in the IITs: 7:3 in favour of boys. Most educationists say that parents do not want to educate their girl children in engineering because of gender, safety away from their hometown and other factors. 

Mr Muralidhar S, a career counsellor, said, “With boys, it is always a set option. They have to do engineering. Parents are more open to their daughters doing other courses many of them because they believe that it does not matter in the long run. The mindset of many parents even today is limited to their daughter settling down and running a household once she is of a certain age.”

Girls in medical colleges outnumber boys by a 3:1 ratio despite medicine requiring more years of study. Ms Jaya Chandran, a career counsellor said, “For a lot of parents, medicine is a prestigious career for girl children. They are not thinking it through about the years of study that will go into it as opposed to engineering.”

Although the number of female software engineers are increasing, it is still a distant dream to have equality in gender at engineering institutes. KNR University of Health Sciences Vice-Chancellor Karunakar Reddy said, “Traditio-nally, engineering is seen as a man’s stream and parents can see their daughters only as a software engineer. We have about 140 girls to 60 boys in our courses. There is actually a better chance of settling into a job after engineering than with medicine. People just have to open their minds to the same.”

“The number of seats for medicine is very few as opposed to engineering. There are merely 50,000 seats as opposed to the lakhs of seats available for engineering  nationwide. So if a girl gets into a premier institute of engineering, she might be dissuaded by her parents who will ask her to join somewhere in their hometown. But in medicine, there is no choice,” said Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi of IIT-Kanpur. 

 “There is always a high number of girls in arts stream because it is believed to be a safe career. But a lot of these societal notions have to be broken down.  Determining a child’s future at a young age should stop and freedom of choice should be given without trying to please  society,” said Mr Praveen Kumar, a parent.