E-Paper
How India could benefit from women’s intellectual capital
This article is authored by Elizabeth Pollitzer, director, Portia Ltd and Ylann Schemm, executive director, Elsevier Foundation.
India’s scientific and cultural histories have often overlooked the intellectual contributions of women. In a century defined by innovation, that imbalance is increasingly out of step. The last 20 years have seen the creation of numerous schemes in India to attract and support women in scientific research. What is needed, however, is fewer, better and more sustainably funded programmes of institutional change, not for 3 years but for 15 or longer. The UK’s Athena Swan Charter for universities has been running since 2005 and served as a model for setting up India’s GATI scheme to develop a gender equality monitoring framework of actions and indicators. Piloted in 2021 with 59 institutions, the framework showed promise. Yet it was not sustained with further funding, despite the evidence that all institutions perceived the need for a gender equality framework and felt it was relevant means to increase gender parity.
In India, the prospect of a woman securing a STEM job is only 14%, and of becoming an academic researcher and author only 35%, compared to men. The 2024 Elsevier gender report, Progress towards Gender Equality in Research & Innovation, which included researchers in India, recommends the following actions to ensure the availability of scientific capital:
- Accelerate commitments and actions towards greater gender equality in research
- Prioritise retention of early-career women researchers into mid and advanced career stages
- Develop incentive structures to help women play an equal part in the full research and innovation value chain
- Apply a broad range of indicators to measure research effectiveness, including societal and policy impact
- Continue to collect and report inclusion and diversity data to monitor progress, identify gaps, evaluate policies, and drive accountability
What is clear from the experience of developed countries is that research and innovation systems thrive in countries with strong national and institutional gender equality cultures. In Europe, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands have been consistently at the top of the EU Innovation Scoreboard, which measures the strength of a country’s innovation system. Critically, these countries are also at the top of the European Institute Gender Equality Index, which measures progress in achieving gender equality across EU Member States, as well as among the highest scoring countries in the EU’s She Figures Index, which measures participation in higher education and in research. The conclusion to draw from these examples is that gender equality in society, education, and research is a critical lever for creating healthy innovation systems and robust knowledge economies.
Empirical evidence reveals why. Research on how gender composition and gender dynamics affect knowledge teams’ processes and performance shows that improving gender balance raises the collective intelligence of the team. Collective intelligence refers to the general ability of a team to work together and perform well on various tasks, from creative endeavours to complex decision making to planning and execution. Success is not about how talented or smart each team member is, but about intellectual diversity, a wider range of problem-solving styles, and better awareness of how context influences the effectiveness and efficacy of proposed solutions.
An analysis from Japan found that patents produced by mixed gender engineering teams were about 20% more valuable than patents produced by male only teams. Similarly, a Harvard University study of participation on the open innovation platform, Innocentive.com, where organizations crowdsource solutions to complex scientific or technical challenges, found that female solvers – known to be in the “outer circle” of the scientific establishment - performed significantly better than men in developing successful solutions.
42.6% of India’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematic) graduates are women, well above the global average of 35% and ahead of countries like the UK, Germany and France. In other words, India has a deep and underutilised talent pool. Harnessing this potential will be critical to building a competitive knowledge economy. Yet gaps remain: the 2024 Innovation Scoreboard identified several areas of underperformance in India’s innovation system, including: “new doctorate graduates, public-private co-publications, and international scientific co-publications”. Addressing these shortfalls will require coordinated action from both government and industry, including a more strategic use of their corporate social responsibility funds to expand STEM opportunities and support women's participation within their fields. Finally, the Confederation of Indian Industry’s 2025 report, spotlighting 49 women entrepreneurs many with STEM roots, makes one point crystal clear: India cannot achieve its Viksit Bharat goal of developed nation status by 2047 without fully unlocking the potential of its women.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Elizabeth Pollitzer, director, Portia Ltd and Ylann Schemm, executive director, Elsevier Foundation.
