Context: From 1951, when the first woman joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), until 2020, women have made up only 13% of all IAS officers. Of 11,569 IAS officers who entered the civil services between 1951 and 2020, only 1,527 were women.
Reasons for low representation of women on higher posts
1. Fewer women take the IAS exam: Every year, hundreds of thousands write the civil services exam (CSE), the recruitment exam to get into the IAS, but only a few thousand make it. The vast majority of these are men. The share of women sitting for the CSE touched 30% of all applicants only once, in 2017, data between 2010 and 2018, released by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), show.
2. Gendered experience in IAS prep: The experience within coaching institutes is also impacted by gender. female students are quite apprehensive to seek support from faculty, nearly all of whom are young-to-middle-aged men. They feel awkward about contacting them informally, outside the classroom, often out of safety concerns, and sometimes out of the fear that they may be judged if they were to reach out to these male teachers on their own. "These mental barriers are absent for male aspirants.
3. A glass ceiling for women: Because of the power an IAS officer can wield, there is little scope for blatant sexism, but biases against women do not go away, from various officers. The rule restricting married women from being in the IAS was removed but the thinking remained that certain jobs (like the police service, for example) were not for women. Even within the IAS, it is implicitly assumed that certain postings are not for women, for example, Haryana got its first woman deputy commissioner only in 1991. As of January 03, 2022, only 14% (13) of the 92 secretaries to the Indian government were women. Across the 36 Indian states and union territories, there were only two women chief secretaries, as of December 3, 2021. India has never had a woman Cabinet secretary to date. And while the majority of women retire after completing their full tenures in the service, they are more likely than men to seek voluntary retirement from service, data compiled by TCPD show.
4. Women shoulder an unequal burden of the housework: A less noticed aspect is that of family expectations: Women, even IAS officers, are expected to balance their work with their roles as wives and mothers, and this double burden can harm their careers, various women officers pointed out. Among other things, this burden impels women to seek 'softer postings' that are likely to give them more free time rather than opt for more challenging roles. When a woman becomes an IAS officer her marriage market goes down, whereas that of a man goes up significantly. People don't want to have an IAS wife because of ego issues.
5. Larger gender gap in IAS applicants from SCs, OBCs, and interstate disparities: While fewer women appear for the CSE as compared to men across all categories, the gender gap between aspirants is wider for those from marginalised communities, as per data available in UPSC reports since 2007.
There is also interstate variation in the gender gap. Women made up 41% of IAS officers, selected between 1970 and 2020, who listed their domicile as Chandigarh, followed by 32% who listed it as Uttarakhand and 29% as Telangana, TCPD-IAS data show. On the other hand, only 3% of all IAS from Tripura have been women, followed by Odisha and Mizoram, at 5%. More women IAS officers as of December 2021 were serving in southern and (broadly) richer states of India, data from the National Informatics Centre show. Karnataka and Telangana are the only two state cadres where 30% of the officers were women. Against that, less than 15% of the cadre in Jammu & Kashmir, Sikkim, Bihar, Tripura and Jharkhand were women.