When Girls Do Science: Why the International Day for Women and Girls in Science Matters for India

Meera was twelve years old when her science teacher in a government school in Tonk district, Rajasthan, handed her a textbook illustration that would quietly shape the next decade of her life. The image showed a laboratory. The scientists in it were all men. The women, if present at all, were carrying files in the background. Meera noticed. She didn't say anything. She just quietly assumed that science wasn't for her.

That assumption — unspoken, uncontested, absorbed through a thousand small signals — is the real enemy the International Day for Women and Girls in Science exists to fight. Observed every year on February 11, this UN-designated day is more than a calendar event. For a country like India, where millions of girls like Meera navigate a daily maze of structural barriers and social expectations, it is a call to rethink what we allow girls to become.

Why the International Day for Women and Girls in Science Matters for India

India produces the third-largest pool of STEM graduates in the world. And yet, according to UNESCO data, women make up only around 28% of researchers in India. The ASER 2023 report tells us that foundational learning levels in rural India remain deeply unequal — and science comprehension among rural girls lags behind in ways that compound across every year of schooling.

The numbers alone don't tell the full story. Behind every percentage point is a classroom where a girl sat in the back row because someone told her physics was difficult for "girls like her." There is a home where a father chose to spend the household's limited school fees on his son's tuition because science coaching is expensive and daughters are expected to marry, not experiment.

This is the ground reality that February 11 asks the world — and India specifically — to confront.

The Gap That Data Reveals

India's National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019-21) shows that girls' secondary school attendance has improved significantly over the past decade. That is genuinely good news. But attendance and engagement are two different things. A girl can sit in a science class and still be invisible to it.

The Ministry of Education's UDISE+ data consistently highlights that girls' dropout rates spike sharply at the transition from upper primary to secondary school — precisely the stage where science becomes a specialised, pathway-defining subject. When girls leave school at 13 or 14, they don't just lose an education. They lose the possibility of a scientific career before they ever had a chance to imagine one.

In states like Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh, the situation is further complicated by the shortage of female science teachers. A girl who has never seen a woman teach chemistry or explain electromagnetic induction has no living proof that science and womanhood coexist. Representation in the classroom is not a luxury — it is a structural necessity.

Understanding why these barriers persist requires looking honestly at the challenges in STEM education facing every child in India, particularly those in under-resourced rural settings where infrastructure, teacher training, and family expectations all converge against a girl's scientific ambition.

What Happens When Girls Stay Out of Science

The consequences of excluding women from science are not abstract. They are measurable and they hurt everyone.

Consider public health. India's rural healthcare system depends heavily on female community health workers — ASHAs and ANMs — who are often the first point of scientific intervention in a village. The quality of that intervention depends on their foundational science education. When girls are pushed away from science early, the pipeline for trained, scientifically literate women in healthcare narrows.

Consider agriculture, where over 60% of rural women workers are engaged, according to Census and NSSO data. Climate adaptation, soil science, pest management — these are scientific domains that directly affect what rural women do every day. Yet the knowledge systems being developed to tackle India's agrarian crisis are built largely without women's scientific voice.

The exclusion is circular and self-reinforcing. Girls don't study science because they don't see women in science. Women aren't in science because girls weren't encouraged to study it. February 11 exists to interrupt that loop.

Rural India: Where the Barriers Are Most Acute

Picture a school in a village in Sitapur district, Uttar Pradesh. There are two science teachers — both male, both overworked, both managing classes of 60 students. The school has a science room listed in its records, but the room is used for storage. The microscopes haven't been touched in three years. When the annual exam approaches, the teacher dictates notes, students memorise, and science becomes an exercise in recall rather than discovery.

Now imagine a girl named Sunita sitting in that class. She is good at mathematics. She asks questions. But after school, she helps her mother with younger siblings, fetches water, and is already being evaluated by neighbours as a potential bride. Her father is not unkind — he just sees no practical return on investing in her science education when no women in his village have ever become engineers or doctors through the government school path.

Sunita's story is not exceptional. It is the modal story of rural girls in STEM, and it is precisely why STEM education for rural girls cannot be treated as an afterthought or a side programme. It must be the centre of any serious conversation about India's scientific future.

The rural-urban classroom divide that separates India's elite science institutions from its village government schools is not merely an infrastructure problem. It is a justice problem. And girls pay the highest price for it.

What February 11 Actually Demands of Us

The International Day for Women and Girls in Science is not a day for feel-good statements and symbolic gestures. It demands specific, structural action. Here is what that looks like in the Indian context.

Representation in Textbooks and Role Models

India's NCERT textbooks have improved somewhat over the years, but the representation of women scientists remains tokenistic. One paragraph on Marie Curie does not counteract 300 pages of science written as if curiosity is a male inheritance. We need Indian women scientists — Janaki Ammal, Asima Chatterjee, Tessy Thomas — woven into the fabric of how science is taught, not relegated to sidebar boxes that teachers routinely skip.

Female Science Teachers in Rural Schools

The Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan has provisions for improving teacher quality, but the targeted placement of female science teachers in rural and tribal schools needs to be treated as a priority outcome, not a hoped-for side effect. A girl's ability to see herself in science often depends on whether she has ever seen a woman teach it.

Addressing the Social Infrastructure

Academic interventions alone cannot hold if the social infrastructure around girls' education keeps collapsing. This means engaging families — especially fathers and older brothers who often hold the practical decision-making power over a girl's schooling. It means making sure mid-day meals, safe toilets, and secure school environments are in place so girls can actually attend and engage. It means recognising that the importance of STEM education in India is inseparable from the broader work of ensuring every child — especially every girl — has the conditions to actually learn.

Scholarships and Pathways That Reach the Periphery

National scholarships for girls in STEM exist — the INSPIRE scheme, state-level merit awards, CBSE merit scholarships. But awareness of these schemes in villages remains startlingly low. A scheme that exists only in a government gazette is not a scheme — it is a bureaucratic formality. The work of getting these opportunities to Meera and Sunita is field-level, relationship-based, and unglamorous. It is also non-negotiable.

The Girls Who Are Already There

It would be a disservice to speak only of barriers without acknowledging the girls who are already pushing through them, often without any institutional support.

In Haryana, where the sex ratio at birth has historically been one of India's worst, something is quietly shifting. Girls' enrolment in science streams at Class 11 has increased meaningfully in government schools over the last decade. In Jharkhand, Adivasi girls who received bridge education programs have gone on to compete in state-level science olympiads. These stories do not make headlines, but they are real and they matter.

They tell us that the capacity is there. The ambition is there. What has been missing is the scaffolding — the mentors, the resources, the family support, the social permission — that turns a curious girl into a confident scientist.

Encouraging girls into STEM careers in India is not about convincing girls that they are capable. Most of them already know that, on some level. It is about removing the structural and social walls that convert their capability into a burden rather than a launchpad.

MMF's Conviction and India's Responsibility

At MMF, we believe that every girl who is denied access to quality science education represents a compounded loss — for her family, her community, and for a country that needs its full intellectual population engaged in solving the problems of the next century.

Our work at Mahadev Maitri Foundation is grounded in the recognition that education equality — and science education in particular — cannot be achieved through charity alone. It requires consistent advocacy, community engagement, and a willingness to sit with families in villages and have the hard conversations about what girls deserve.

India cannot claim to be a science-powered economy while leaving half its intellectual capacity out of the equation. The International Day for Women and Girls in Science is a prompt — but the work it represents happens 365 days a year, in classrooms, in homes, in district education offices, and in the conversations we choose to have with the next generation.

The Question We Must Answer Together

Meera, the girl from Tonk who looked at a textbook and quietly concluded that science wasn't for her — she eventually found a female science teacher in Class 9 who told her otherwise. That teacher is the reason Meera is now preparing for her Class 12 board exams in the science stream.

One teacher. One conversation. One refusal to let a girl disappear from the scientific imagination.

That is both the smallness and the enormity of what February 11 asks of us. Not grand gestures. Just the sustained, daily commitment to making sure every girl in every village knows, with certainty, that science is hers if she wants it.

If you believe that too, join us in this work. And if you want to help build the conditions that make it possible for more girls like Meera to find their teacher, consider supporting MMF's mission. The future of Indian science is sitting in a government school right now, waiting for someone to take her seriously.

*Mahadev Maitri Foundation is a registered NGO working on rural education, child rights, and girl child empowerment across India.*