I remember sitting through yet another mandatory wellness seminar, watching a generic HR video on building resilience. As I looked around the room at my female colleagues who are brilliant researchers, yet visibly exhausted from juggling grant deadlines and heavy social expectations. It unsettled me and left me wondering, were we being asked to individually empower our way out of systemic failures? Because no amount of resilience training can fix structural exhaustion.
Over the past decade, women’s participation in STEMM education in India has steadily increased. Yet their progression into leadership roles remains strikingly low. This gap suggests that the issue is not a lack of talent or ambition, but structural barriers embedded within academic institutions. Based on my observations within the Indian academic ecosystem, addressing these barriers requires moving beyond individual empowerment and toward institutional reform.
Simply put, women in science don’t need sympathy;
they need understanding and the institutional space to grow.
I remember a colleague who returned to the lab just a few months after giving birth. She would slip out between experiments to take calls from home, checking if her child had eaten, if the fever had come down, if everything was okay. In meetings, she was as sharp as ever, presenting data, asking questions, holding her ground, but there was always a quiet urgency beneath it all.
I think of another early-career researcher who once told me, almost apologetically, that she hadn’t been productive enough that month. She had been juggling teaching, grant writing, and family expectations, sleeping barely a few hours each night. Yet what stayed with her was not exhaustion, but guilt. In a culture where output is everything, burnout disguises itself as personal failure. The pressure is constant, but the support is minimal and often invisible.
Then there are the CVs that carry silence. A year missing here, a gap there, time taken for caregiving, for health and for life. These pauses are rarely explained, yet they are quietly judged. What was necessary becomes what is questioned, and over time, these small penalties accumulate, shaping who moves forward and who is left behind.
None of these stories are exceptional. They are, in fact, deeply ordinary.
That is precisely the problem.
Perhaps the issue is not the pause itself, but how little our systems understand what these pauses carry. Caregiving, recovery, and emotional strain are not deviations from a career, they are part of life within it. Yet instead of building structures that acknowledge this, institutions often respond with generic resilience trainings and one-size-fits-all wellness modules.
If resilience must be built, it cannot be outsourced to HR videos alone. It must be embedded within the system itself through evaluation practices that recognize lived realities, and through cultures that are educated not just to support women, but to understand the weight they are already carrying. Providing mental health support systems that help women build resilience and give them confidence to move through life burdens.
True progress in women’s leadership will not come from asking women to adapt to rigid institutional systems. It requires institutions willing to rethink how academic careers are structured and evaluated.
By embedding gender literacy, strengthening meaningful mental health support, and normalizing career pauses, institutions can move from symbolic inclusion to genuine structural equity. Only then can the growing number of women entering STEMM translate into a new generation of scientific leaders.
