GoKawiilRoughly half the world’s population is female, but the STEM fields don’t reflect that. The 2024 U.N. Global Education Monitoring Report on gender found that about 35 percent of STEM college graduates were women. The proportion hasn’t increased much in more than a decade.
When it comes to STEM careers, the percentage is even lower. Women made up about 28 percent of the global STEM workforce in 2024, according to the World Economic Forum.
There are myriad factors for the discrepancy, including a lack of family support, some teachers encouraging only boys to pursue STEM subjects, and a shortage of female role models.
But one force is at play long before college majors are ever considered: limited access to STEM-focused educational resources for preuniversity students. Especially for students in rural communities, the limited access curtails curiosity in STEM subjects before interest can take root. Although the lack of opportunity impacts boys and girls alike, when combined with other factors it can have an outsized effect on girls in some rural regions.
IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi is one of the creators of the Women in Science, Engineering project. He is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Rajiv Joshi
One such place is rural India. The challenges of pursuing a STEM education—or any education at all—increase sharply as rural Indian girls move into their teen years. Social barriers including early marriage, traditional gender roles, and familial expectations for financial support contribute to girls’ dropping out of school, according to the Mahadev Maitri Foundation, a nongovernment organization focused on childhood education in underdeveloped areas. Dropout rates for girls spike between the ages of 11 to 14, according to the foundation.
The trend is something IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi and IEEE Senior Member Rajesh Zele want to change. A shared passion to keep rural Indian girls from dropping out of school and on paths to STEM careers led them to launch the Women in Science, Engineering (WiSE) project.
“Talent is universal, but opportunity is not,” Joshi says. “WiSE is one way to expand opportunities.”
Bringing the WiSE vision to life
Joshi, vice president of industry for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Zele is a professor of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), in suburban Mumbai.
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