Why has no girl ever topped JEE Advanced?

Is this just about rankings, or does it reveal a larger story about who gets encouraged to pursue engineering in India?

Transcript

00:00Arohi Deshpande is the All India female topper for the JE Advanced with an All India rank of 77.

00:05That means boys hold the first 76 ranks. And a girl is yet to secure the top rank in JE

00:10Advanced.

00:11Devdatta Maji secured All India Rank 16 in JE Advanced 2025. In 2024, Dvija Dharmesh Kumar

00:17Patel secured All India Rank 7. This article in 2021 looked at why girls are missing from IITs.

00:23Even today, the IIT gender ratio is roughly one girl for every four boys. And here's the thing,

00:29IITs have introduced supernumerary seats for women. But why was that necessary in the first place?

00:34Is it because boys are naturally better at maths and science? Research says no. Girls neither lack

00:39interest in STEM nor any biological aptitude for it. But because ladka hua to engineer, ladki hui to doctor.

00:45And this Reddit comment from 2025 said that a girl wasn't allowed to study engineering because of

00:50the male crowd. And this was in 2025. When we tell stories about men in STEM, they sound like Albert

00:56Einstein, the genius patent clerk, Isaac Newton, the apple and gravity, Elon Musk, the kid who built rockets,

01:03Srinivas Ramanujan, the self-taught maths prodigy. But when we look at women in STEM, it's about

01:07Janaki Amal, who fought gender and caste barriers before becoming a scientist. Catherine Johnson first

01:13had to navigate segregation before calculating spaceflight trajectories. Jocelyn Bell Burnell

01:18discovered radio pulses, but men received the Nobel. Mary Anning found Jurassic marine fossils that

01:23transformed science but couldn't participate as an equal in scientific institutions. Men in STEM are

01:28often remembered for the problem they solved. Women in STEM are often remembered for the barriers

01:32they had to overcome before they were even allowed to solve the problem. But I guess there are small

01:36wins. For the first time ever, more than 10,000 girls have qualified JE Advance, with 2026 recording

01:42the highest female pass rate on record. So, what do you think?