Engineers’ Day 2026: Women’s intake at IITs up 52% since 2019, modest rise in share

Across the 23 IITs, women accounted for 17.76% of the students allotted seats in 2019. By 2025, the corresponding figure had risen to 20.15%. This is an increase of 2.39 percentage points, or roughly 13.5% over the six years.

Read | National Engineers’ Day 2026: Why is it celebrated on September 15? The change becomes more visible when the absolute numbers are considered. The number of female students rose from 2,416 in 2019 to 3,664 in 2025, an increase of about 52%.

At the same time, the total number of seats allotted increased from 13,604 to 18,188, or about 34%. In other words, the growth in the number of women entering the IITs has outpaced the overall expansion in seats. The shift follows a policy intervention specifically designed to address the historically low representation of women in the IITs.

The government announced that female enrolment, then around 8%, would be increased through supernumerary seats to 14% in 2018-19, 17% in 2019-20 and 20% in 2020-21. It created 835 such seats in 2018-19 and 1,122 in 2019-20.

The 2019 JEE (Advanced) information brochure also explicitly stated that these additional seats were being created without reducing the number of seats available to gender-neutral candidates, to improve the gender balance in undergraduate programmes.

The admission data suggests that the intervention had its most immediate effect in bringing the IITs closer to the 20% mark. In 2019, the female share ranged from 16.67% at IIT Goa to 20.68% at IIT Indore. By 2025, every IIT in the dataset was at or above roughly 19%, with the highest share at IIT Tirupati at 21.57% and IIT Madras at 21.09%.

This also means that the story is no longer simply about a few IITs increasing their female intake. The numbers have become considerably more uniform across campuses. IIT Bombay, for instance, went from 17.78% women in 2019 to 19.57% in 2025, while IIT Kharagpur moved from 16.82% to 19.19%.

IIT Hyderabad, which was already at 18.61% in 2019, reached 20.13% in 2025. The numbers show that more women are joining IIT engineering programs. There is now nearly one woman for every four students, and the actual number of women entering the system has increased much more than the percentage alone shows.