Marriage to education: Why there have been so few women in hallowed IAS

 Of 11,569 IAS officers who entered the civil services between 1951 and 2020, only 1,527 were women

From 1951, when the first woman joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), until 2020, women have made up only 13% of all IAS officers. Of 11,569 IAS officers who entered the civil services between 1951 and 2020, only 1,527 were women, shows an IndiaSpend analysis of the Indian Administrative Service Officers Dataset compiled by the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) at Ashoka University.

To be sure, India has come a long way from when the board that interviewed Anna Rajam George, the first woman to pass the IAS exam, actively discouraged her, asking her to consider the foreign or central services instead. George’s appointment letter even came with the condition that “in the event of marriage your service will be terminated”.

The rule was subsequently changed and she continued in service even after marriage. But progress has been slow. In 1970, women made up 9% of those entering the IAS; that proportion rose to just 31% by 2020. Currently 21% of serving IAS officers are women, show data from the National Informatics Centre. The TCPD-IAS dataset is not exhaustive for the two decades from 1951 to 1970, and so the analysis that follows uses its data from 1970 to 2020.