Globalisation and Delineation of Women in Engineering Domains

Globalisation has transformed world trade, communications, educational activities and economic relations since the later part of the 20^th century. In mid 80’s, the number of girl students in an engineering program in India, was hardly worth mentioning. This has been indicated by several studies and enrollment data available in public domain of engineering institutions at national as well as state level. As a result of globalisation, in early 90’s the IT sector in India and demand of Indian IT professionals in aboard grown at an exponential rate. This suddenly created a huge vacuum in qualified man power. As a result of this private participation in engineering education saw a sudden spurt, threw open opportunities for the enrolment of girls in engineering institutions. With privatization of higher and professional education, enrolment of women in the engineering courses has seen an unprecedented increase. In spite of the increased growth in the number of girls entering engineering courses, there are still many issues which prevent girls from opting for technical education. 

However, the present paper seeks to find out the trends in the enrolment of women in different branches of engineering which is traditionally considered as masculine discipline by comparing the last 10 years enrollment data of National Institute of Technology, Surat. The study also attempts to explore socio-cultural attitudes, religious beliefs and practices that limit women’s mobility, access to resources and type of activities they can pursue that poses an obstacle in making career and course choices, Institutional arrangement that create and reinforce gender-based constraints and prevent the girls for opting technical courses.