South Asian Women at MIT
It was nearly a full century after MIT’s founding in 1861 that the first South Asian woman, Almitra Patel ‘58, SM ‘59, graduated from the Institute. Another decade passed before MIT appointed a South Asian woman, Professor Prabha Sridharan, to the faculty in 1973 in Engineering. Across all five schools, South Asian women—undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty—were admitted to the Institute three-to-five decades after South Asian men, and in much smaller numbers.
The earliest South Asian women to attend MIT came from families that owned business enterprises. MIT offered them the opportunity to acquire technical skills to support and expand their familial ventures. These were exceptionally talented women who navigated a demanding academic environment in male-dominated fields. Over time, the growing presence of South Asians at MIT led subsequent generations of women to embrace the Institute as a stepping stone for a new life in the United States, choosing to settle there and build new careers separate from that of their families.
Till 1980, less than a dozen South Asian women had graduated from MIT. In the 1990s, the Institute began to actively recruit more women into its undergraduate classes in the 1990s to correct this imbalance. At the turn of the century, the number of South Asian female students at MIT quadrupled from less than a hundred to almost 400. Today, South Asian women constitute approximately a quarter, 1,500 in total, of MIT’s South Asian alumni. However, as of 2023, South Asian female faculty remain a minority across the Institute.
Graphed below are the numbers of South Asian students of both genders over the decades as best as we can determine, having manually gone through graduation records. Please note that each bar represents the number of students in that decade.
" It was very difficult for me to maintain my Indianness and yet try to assimilate. " - Dr. Sonal Jhaveri ‘70, SM ‘73, School of Science. Director of Science, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, USA.
" I was extraordinary because I was a woman and I was from South Asia. " - Dr. Swapna Mukhopadhyay PhD ‘73, SHASS. Professor Emeritus, Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi & Former Director, Institute of Social Studies Trust, India.
" It was particularly difficult to be a woman of color. There was no other woman of color, leave alone South Asian in my class. There was no Latina, no Black women…You stood out and it was not in a very pleasant way. " - Raji Patel SM ‘77, Sloan, Co-Director, (NASA) Space Grant Consortium, MIT.
" I have other accomplishments that no one paid attention to. It was just the fact that I was the first female. That bothered me…My first boss believed that if people didn’t give you credit, just work harder. That’s a false narrative we need to shake off. " - Dr. Geetha Rao PhD ‘87, School of Engineering. First female graduate student in Course 13, CEO, Springborne Life Sciences, California.
" The percentage of women engineers at the time was very, very low, " - Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy, Founder & Director, Active-adaptive Control, MIT School of Engineering (1991-today).
" When I declared physics as a major, many other women did too but by the end of the second year, most had dropped out, because it was a very cold and not very welcoming milieu…MIT doesn’t rank empathy at all. " - Anonymous
" I’ve gotten used to being underestimated. I’ve developed some coping mechanisms for calibrating the audience so that they quickly understand what experience I bring to the conversation. " - Professor Sangeeta Bhatia SM ’93, MD-PhD ‘97, School of Engineering, Director, Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, member, Ludwig Center (MIT, Broad Institute of MIT, Associated Faculty, Wyss Institute, Biomedical Engineering, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Department of Medicine.
" I have a hard time adjusting when I’m somewhere new; settling down is infinitely scarier when you don’t know what that will look like or who will welcome you. " - Aleena Shabbir ‘20, School of Engineering, Co-author of “Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air” (2022).
" Being a woman in a math heavy field, the percentages of representation are still not at where they should be. " - Dr. Swati Mohan PhD ‘10, School of Engineering. Supervisor for Guidance, Navigation & Control Systems, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"The first South Asian women spent their time at MIT connecting their studies to issues faced in their home countries. After graduation, their careers were intimately involved in reforms focused on social welfare in South Asia affecting climate legislation, health equity, and education. These women have left behind a powerful legacy for future generations of South Asian women at MIT, paving the way for diversity and inclusion at the Institute and beyond. " - Sarah Syed, 2024, Student Researcher