Being a Girl at an NIT — The Things We Do Not Say at Orientation

At my NIT Trichy orientation, one of the faculty coordinators mentioned, in the context of welcoming us, that the college had seen a significant improvement in its gender ratio over the past five years. It has. When I joined, about 20% of the batch was women, up from around 12% five years before. This is real progress and I want to acknowledge it genuinely before I describe what that 20% actually experiences, because the two things can both be true.

I am writing this as someone finishing my fourth year, which means I have four years of data on what it is like to be a woman at a campus that was built, in almost every structural way, for a student body that was assumed to be male.

The Small Things That Add Up

The girls' hostel is a 15-minute walk from the main academic area. The boys' hostels are closer. This sounds like a minor logistical detail and it becomes a different kind of detail at 11 PM when you have a lab that runs late, or at 6 AM for a morning class, or in the rain. Nobody designed this layout to disadvantage women. Nobody changed it when the gender ratio changed, either.

The labs and workshops have a ratio problem that takes a semester or two to fully understand. When there are four women in a lab batch of thirty, group work has a texture to it that is hard to describe but is immediately recognisable to anyone who has experienced it: the automatic assumption in group formation, the way credit distributes after a project, the specific exhaustion of having to establish your technical competence in the same room as people who never have to.

The Things That Are Actually Better Than Expected

The women I met at NIT Trichy are some of the most capable people I have encountered anywhere. There is something that happens when you are a small minority navigating a system not built for you: either you leave, or you develop a very particular quality of adaptability and self-sufficiency. Most of the women who stayed developed both. My closest friendships from college are with women from my batch and I think the shared experience of navigating this campus created a depth of understanding that I am grateful for.

The faculty have, in my experience, been broadly fair. Individual exceptions exist, as they do everywhere, but the formal structures around grading and opportunity are not where the inequity mostly lives. It lives in the informal ones: in who gets invited to which coding group, in whose technical opinion gets questioned in a team meeting, in the specific calculation every woman here has had to make about how to present confidence without triggering the particular discomfort that confident women apparently produce in certain social contexts.

I am writing this because the orientation speech every year focuses on the improving ratio and not on the experience of the people inside that ratio. Both conversations need to happen. The ratio matters. What students find when they get here matters more.