Classrooms Full, Boardrooms Empty: The Glass Ceiling in Kashmir’s Higher Education |
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The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 places gender equity at the centre of India’s higher-education reform agenda. It calls for “gender-sensitive and inclusive leadership, governance, and operations” and urges institutions to ensure the “equitable and inclusive participation of women in all aspects of higher education, including academic and administrative leadership”. Yet, six years after its adoption, this promise remains largely rhetorical. Across India, women continue to be systematically excluded from positions of power in universities and colleges. Nowhere is this exclusion more entrenched than in Kashmir.
At the national level, women’s presence in higher education appears, at first glance, encouraging. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2022, women constitute 48% of total student enrolments, accounting for over 20.7 million learners, and 43.4% of faculty members. However, this numerical presence steadily declines as one moves up the academic hierarchy.
Women make up 44.41% of assistant professors, 37.85% of associate professors, and only 29.52% of full professors. Their representation shrinks further in leadership roles: women occupy just 20–25% of deanships and department heads, a mere 7% of vice-chancellorships, and lead only 9.55% of higher education institutions in the country.
These figures reflect a structural pattern rather than a transitional lag. This is highlighted by the recent Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) India Index 2023-24, which ranks Gender Equality (SDG-5) as India’s lowest-performing goal.
In short, higher education, often imagined as a progressive space, reproduces deep gender hierarchies. And within this already unequal national landscape, the situation in Kashmir is severely grim. So severe is the leadership deficit that it took 75 years after independence for the Valley to appoint its first woman vice-chancellor, in 2022.
Data from