Gender: Does the Education Pipeline Look Different for Girls and Boys?

A Complete Analysis of the Gender Dimension in India’s Education System — From Pre-Primary Class to PhD — Using UDISE+ 2025-26 and AISHE 2023-24

Prof. Arun C. Mehta  |  Ex. Head, EMIS, NIEPA  |  educationforallinindia.com  | UDISEPlus 2025-26 Data Analysis

Introduction: The Question the Data Can Now Answer

For decades, gender equity in Indian education was framed as a problem of girls’ access — too few girls in school, too many left behind at primary level, too great a distance between a girl’s home and the nearest secondary school. That framing was accurate for the 1990s and 2000s. It is no longer accurate — or at least, no longer complete — in 2025-26.

The combined evidence of UDISE+ 2025-26 and AISHE 2023-24 tells a more complex story: one of significant female progress in school education at every level and every stage — not just at the margins — partial convergence in higher education, persistent structural segregation by subject and discipline, a narrowing but real PhD gap, and an emerging boys’ disadvantage at secondary and higher secondary level that has gone largely unacknowledged in policy. Understanding all of these simultaneously is the task of a complete gender analysis of India’s education pipeline.

This article traces the pipeline from pre-primary class to PhD, examining at each stage whether the gender composition differs from expectation, what the efficiency indicators (dropout, transition, retention, GER, GPI) reveal, where the pipeline diverges for girls and boys, and what it means for NEP 2020’s gender equity goals.

Stage 1: Pre-Primary and Primary — Where the Pipeline Begins

In 2025-26, India’s pre-primary classrooms enrolled 1,49,12,909 children — of whom 46.6% are girls (69,52,102). This is the entry point where the gender gap first appears, and it favours boys: 53.4% of pre-primary enrolment is male. This reflects both demographic factors (India’s sex ratio at birth continues to show a slight male surplus) and, in some communities, a preference for enrolling boys earlier in formal pre-schooling.

India Gender Education Pipeline Trends.

At primary level (Classes I-V), girls constitute 48.0% of 10.19 crore students. This near-parity reflects the cumulative effect of multiple interventions over two decades — Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) residentials, PM-POSHAN (Mid-Day Meal), girls’ toilet construction under Swachh Vidyalaya, and the constitutional mandate of the Right to Education Act. Primary GER shows girls (90.8%) ahead of boys (88.2%) — a GPI of 1.029 — meaning girls of the appropriate age are more likely to be enrolled in primary school than boys at the national aggregate level, and by a wider margin than a bare enrolment-share comparison would suggest.

Stage 2: Upper Primary — Girls Build Their Widest Access Lead

Upper Primary (Classes VI-VIII) enrols 6.32 crore students, of whom 48.4% are girls. On enrolment share alone, this looks like a marginal dip from Primary’s 48.0% — but the GER and GPI tell a very different and more important story. Girls’ Upper Primary GER (92.4%) exceeds boys’ (87.2%) by 5.2 percentage points — a GPI of 1.060, the second-widest gender gap at any school level after Higher Secondary. Far from a “divergence point” where boys gain ground, Upper Primary is where girls’ relative advantage in access becomes most pronounced, once GER — a measure of age-appropriate enrolment relative to the eligible population — rather than raw enrolment share is used.

The Primary-to-Upper Primary transition rate confirms the same pattern: girls (94.3%) ahead of boys (93.4%) by 0.9 ppt — the first evidence of what becomes a consistent pattern through the rest of the pipeline: once girls are in school and moving through the system, they are more likely than boys to proceed to the next level at every transition from Class 5 onwards. The dropout rate differential at Upper Primary level — boys 3.8% vs girls 3.4% — reinforces this: girls are more likely to stay in school once enrolled, at every stage examined in this analysis.

Stage 3: Secondary — The Gender Reversal Confirmed

At Secondary level (Classes IX-X), India’s 3.83 crore students are 48.6% girls — and the GPI confirms a decisive shift. Secondary GER is 83.4% for girls and 79.7% for boys, giving a GPI of 1.046. Girls are more likely than boys to be enrolled in Classes 9-10 relative to their age group. The Upper Primary-to-Secondary transition (girls 88.7% vs boys 87.9%) and the dramatically lower girls’ secondary dropout (8.0% vs boys’ 10.9%) combine to confirm that the second decade of school education in India favours girls on every access and retention measure examined here.

Stage 4: Higher Secondary — Girls Cross 50% and Build the Widest Lead

Higher Secondary (Classes XI-XII) is where the gender data in 2025-26 achieves its most significant milestone. With 50.4% girls in Higher Secondary enrolment (1,45,58,368 out of 2,88,59,146), girls now form a numerical majority at this level — a threshold reached for the first time — and on the efficiency indicators, they lead just as decisively. The Secondary-to-Higher-Secondary transition rate shows girls (80.7%) ahead of boys (75.5%) by 5.2 ppt — the largest gender gap at any transition point. Higher Secondary GPI is 1.100 (girls GER 64.8% vs boys 58.9%) — the widest GER gap of any level. And the Class 1-to-12 cumulative retention rate places girls (55.0%) a full 5.8 ppt ahead of boys (49.2%) — boys’ HS retention is still below 50%, while girls crossed this threshold for the first time this year.

The Full School Efficiency Picture: Dropout, Transition and Retention by Gender

Source: UDISE+ 2025-26, Tables 6.1, 6.13, 6.14, 6.15. ▲ = above 50% for first time; ▼ = still below 50%. Note that girls’ GPI advantage is widest at Higher Secondary (1.100) and second-widest at Upper Primary (1.060) — not narrowest, as a raw enrolment-share comparison alone might suggest.

State-wise Gender Patterns: Where the Pipeline Diverges Most

Source: UDISE+ 2025-26, Table 6.15.

Bihar: The Critical Exception

Bihar (girls 9.1% vs boys 8.9% secondary dropout) is the only large state in India where the national gender pattern reverses at secondary level. Girls in Bihar are marginally more likely than boys to drop out of Classes 9-10. This is consistent with — and plausibly connected to — child marriage pressure (Bihar has one of the highest child marriage rates nationally), household economic constraints that prioritise girls’ domestic roles over secondary completion, and a comparatively low female teacher share at secondary level in Bihar. It is also reflected in Bihar’s Sec→HS girls transition (74.7%) being below the national average girls’ transition (80.7%) — girls who complete Class 10 in Bihar are less likely than the national average to proceed to Class 11. Bihar’s gender reversal in secondary dropout warrants targeted policy attention: monitoring of Class 9-10 girls’ retention under existing conditional cash transfer schemes (such as Mukhyamantri Kanya Utthan Yojana), and continued female secondary teacher recruitment.

Assam: Where Girls Lose Their Sec→HS Advantage

Assam presents a different gender anomaly. While girls outperform boys in HS retention nationally (55.0% vs 49.2%), in Assam girls’ Sec→HS transition (51.6%) is actually below boys’ (56.2%) — one of the few states where boys are more likely than girls to proceed from Class 10 to Class 11. Assam’s overall Sec→HS transition (53.7%) is the lowest of any state, but the gender breakdown reveals that the bottleneck falls more severely on girls. This likely reflects both geographic access issues (fewer co-educational or girls’ HS schools within reach) and social factors that specifically restrict girls’ post-Class 10 mobility in Assam’s predominantly rural school catchment areas.

Stage 5: Higher Education — The Numbers, the Gains and the Gaps (AISHE 2023-24)

AISHE 2023-24 records total higher education enrolment of 4.50 crore — of whom 2.24 crore (49.7%) are women. Female higher education enrolment has grown from 1.57 crore in 2014-15 to 2.24 crore in 2023-24 — a 42.2% increase in nine years. The national HE GPI of 1.08 means women’s Gross Enrolment Ratio now exceeds men’s — 31.2% female GER against a lower male GER — a milestone that has held for seven consecutive years, and one that would have seemed aspirational a decade ago.

Source: AISHE 2023-24 (Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education), Sections 2.2, 2.4 and 3.2, and Box 11 (level-wise enrolment and CAGR). All figures verified directly against the published report.

The PG lead (56.2% female) is particularly striking. Women now form a clear majority of India’s postgraduate students — a reversal from the 2014-15 pattern where PG enrolment was male-dominated. This is consistent with women’s growing majority presence in Arts and Social Sciences, Education, and Medical and Paramedical postgraduate programmes nationally. Aggregate PG parity, however, does not extend uniformly across every discipline: technical and management postgraduate programmes remain closer to parity or male-leaning even as the PG aggregate is female-majority.

The PhD trajectory is striking in its own right: female PhD scholars have grown at a substantially faster rate than the overall PhD population over the past decade, and women now account for 49.8% of PhD scholars nationally — near parity, and a large gain from roughly 41% in 2014-15. As with PG, this aggregate conceals real disciplinary variation: women’s PhD representation in the sciences is close to or above parity, while Engineering and Technology PhDs remain more heavily male, broadly consistent with the pattern seen at UG level below.

The Subject Segregation Wall: Where the Gender Pipeline Diverges Most

The single most consequential gender gap in India’s education system in 2023-24 is not in enrolment numbers — it is in subject choice. Women are present in near-equal or majority numbers in most disciplines but are heavily concentrated in some (Education, Medical, Arts, Science) and severely underrepresented in others, most notably Engineering and Technology. This disciplinary segregation directly affects lifetime earnings, occupational mobility and economic independence — making it an equity issue that aggregate GPI figures do not capture.

Source: AISHE 2023-24, Section 2.2.6.1 (Discipline-wise Enrolment at Under Graduate Level), based on actual response.

At postgraduate level, the discipline picture is similarly instructive: PG Social Science, the largest PG discipline (10.6 lakh students), is 59.4% female; PG Science (8.6 lakh students) is 61.4% female; but PG Management (10.4 lakh students, dominated by the MBA) is only 43.3% female — a persistent gap in the high-earnings professional credential space that the overall PG female majority (56.2%) conceals. At PhD level, the same pattern holds: Science accounts for 23.4% of all PhD enrolment and is 53.4% female, while Engineering and Technology accounts for 20.5% of PhD enrolment and remains considerably more male-dominated, consistent with the discipline’s UG pattern.

Nationally, women’s overall STEM enrolment share (UG, PG, Integrated and PhD combined) stood at 44% in 2023-24, up from 38.4% in 2014-15 — but this STEM aggregate blends Science (54.6% female across all levels) with Engineering and Technology specifically (31.1% female at UG), and it is Engineering’s low share that pulls the combined STEM figure well below 50% despite Science’s above-parity performance.

The Engineering gender gap (31.1% female, 68.9% male) is the most consequential disciplinary disparity in India’s higher education system. Engineering and Technology is the second-largest UG discipline by enrolment (43.9 lakh, AISHE 2023-24), is a primary pathway to high-income private-sector employment, and underpins India’s ambitions in manufacturing, digital infrastructure and deep-tech. A female participation rate of 31.1% means that roughly 30 lakh of India’s 43.9 lakh Engineering UG students are male — a structural pipeline that will continue to produce male-dominated technology workforces for years unless addressed at both the school level (girls’ science and lab access) and the higher-education level (scholarships, targeted admissions, mentorship).

By contrast, women’s majority position in Medical Science (57.4%) and near-majority in basic Science (53.4%) challenges any narrative that women broadly avoid STEM fields. Indian women are choosing biology-related sciences at rates matching or exceeding men; the underrepresentation is specific to applied technology and engineering. The likely determinants include social perceptions of engineering as a male field, family resistance to girls’ residential engineering education, and the historical scarcity of female role models in technical careers — all addressable through deliberate policy rather than reflecting inherent preference.

Social Category Dimension: SC, ST, OBC and Minority Women

AISHE 2023-24 provides a genuinely positive picture of social category women’s participation in higher education. Total SC enrolment in higher education stood at 69.7 lakh in 2023-24, up 51.4% from 46.1 lakh in 2014-15; total ST enrolment stood at 28.8 lakh, up 75.7% from 16.4 lakh; and total OBC enrolment stood at 1.80 crore, up 60.2% from 1.13 crore over the same period.

SC women: 35.1 lakh enrolled in 2023-24 (50.3% of total SC HE enrolment) — SC women have crossed parity within the SC category. SC female HE enrolment grew 25.2% in five years (2019-20 to 2023-24) and 66.9% since 2014-15 — the fastest five-year growth rate of any gender-category combination in this dataset.

ST women: 15.1 lakh enrolled (52.4% of total ST HE enrolment) — ST women outnumber ST men in higher education, a genuine reversal from historical patterns. ST female enrolment grew 39.2% over five years and 102% since 2014-15. The GPI for the SC category (1.11) exceeds the national HE GPI of 1.08; the ST category GPI matches the national figure at 1.08.

OBC women: 90.0 lakh enrolled (49.9% of total OBC HE enrolment) — near parity within OBC, with 27.8% five-year growth, broadly consistent with the national female HE growth rate.

Minority women: 17.4 lakh enrolled in 2023-24, up from 10.7 lakh in 2014-15 — a 62.9% increase, among the fastest growth rates of any category tracked in AISHE. As the site’s companion Muslim education analysis documents, Muslim girls’ school participation continues to improve, though Higher Secondary and higher-education access gaps remain larger for Muslim girls than for any other major community.

The Gender Pipeline: A Complete View

Source: UDISE+ 2025-26 (Tables 5.6, 6.1) and AISHE 2023-24 (national summary).

The Teacher Workforce: Gender Dimensions

India’s school teacher workforce in 2025-26 is 54.9% female (56,44,217 women out of 1,02,73,020 teachers) — the highest female share in UDISE+ history. This is a direct consequence of government recruitment policies that have prioritised female hiring, particularly at foundational and primary level.

The gradient by level is important and runs in the opposite direction from a flat, uniformly-above-50% pattern: female representation is highest among teachers working at Pre-Primary and Primary levels and declines at Secondary and Higher Secondary levels, where teachers with subject-specialist Higher Secondary responsibilities in particular skew more male. This is consistent with a broader, long-documented pattern in Indian school staffing — foundational-level teaching has feminised fastest, while senior subject-specialist teaching, especially at Higher Secondary, has feminised more slowly. Closing this gradient — rather than assuming female teacher representation is already uniform across levels — is itself a relevant equity target, since a female-teacher presence at secondary and higher secondary level has documented associations with girls’ retention at those same levels.

In higher education (AISHE 2023-24), the gender composition of faculty is less favourable than in schools: 44.9% of all faculty are female (7.78 lakh of 17.32 lakh total) — below the school teacher female share of 54.9%. Female faculty has grown from 5.69 lakh in 2014-15 to 7.78 lakh in 2023-24 — a 36.7% increase in nine years — but still meaningfully below parity. The feminisation of school teaching has not yet extended to higher education faculty at the same pace, particularly in senior and research-track positions.

Source: UDISE+ 2025-26, Table 4.13 (teachers by gender and classes taught — a school may be counted under more than one teaching-level category; figures for Secondary and Higher Secondary responsibility are computed by combining the report’s overlapping teaching-level categories and are therefore approximate); AISHE 2023-24, national faculty release.

The Emerging Boys’ Disadvantage: A Policy Blind Spot

The consistent pattern across UDISE+ 2025-26 data — boys trailing girls at every school efficiency indicator from primary onwards — raises a question that Indian education policy has not yet formally addressed: is there an emerging boys’ disadvantage that requires a gender-responsive policy response?

The answer requires careful framing. Boys’ overall educational position is not disadvantaged in outcome terms — men continue to dominate high-earning technical disciplines and senior academic and economic-decision-making positions. The boys’ secondary dropout of 10.9% and HS retention below 50% (49.2%) are not producing disadvantaged men relative to women in the labour market on current evidence. What they are producing is a large absolute number — millions of boys each year who leave the school system without completing Class 12 — whose long-term consequences for individuals and for India’s human capital are real and should not be ignored simply because the aggregate gender narrative now favourably positions girls at school level.

NEP 2020 and Gender Equity: What the Data Demands

NEP 2020 articulates a gender equity vision centred on three elements: inclusive access to quality education for girls and women; enabling girls to pursue traditionally male-dominated fields including science, technology and mathematics; and supporting men and boys to participate equally in traditionally female-dominated fields. The UDISE+ 2025-26 and AISHE 2023-24 data suggests that India is making strong progress on the first element, early but real progress on the third (rising female teacher shares, growing female PhD representation across most disciplines), and slower progress on the second — Engineering remains markedly male-dominated after more than a decade of effort, notwithstanding gradual year-on-year improvement.

Address Bihar’s gender reversal in secondary dropout with a targeted intervention. Girls’ secondary dropout exceeding boys’ in Bihar (9.1% vs 8.9%) is not a minor statistical anomaly — it is connected to child marriage pressure, comparatively low female-teacher availability at secondary level, and inadequate girls’ safety infrastructure at the secondary stage. A Bihar-specific block-level gender audit of secondary school girls’ dropout, with district-level action plans, would target the state’s most specific and identifiable gender gap.

Scale up Assam’s girls’ Sec→HS transition support as a targeted programme. Girls’ Sec→HS transition in Assam (51.6%) is below boys’ (56.2%) and far below the national girls’ average (80.7%). Assam-specific HS girls’ hostels, conditional bursaries for Class 11 enrolment, and improved access to multi-stream HS institutions within commutable distance should be prioritised.

Sustain and scale a national Engineering and Technology access programme for women. The female share in Engineering UG has improved only gradually over more than a decade. Scholarships, mentorship, residential support, school-level STEM exposure for girls, and industry partnerships are needed to accelerate this. The baseline is already positive: women are at or near parity in Science and Medical disciplines, suggesting the specific barrier is applied technology, not women’s science aptitude or interest.

Develop a gender-responsive secondary retention programme for boys. With boys’ secondary dropout (10.9%) nearly 3 ppt above girls’ and boys’ HS retention (49.2%) below 50%, boys’ secondary completion is a genuine and distinct policy concern. NEP 2020’s vocational integration mandate — making secondary school economically relevant through labour-market-linked vocational modules — is the most directly applicable lever.

Publish gender-disaggregated data at district and block level annually. The gender patterns analysed in this article are visible at state level; at district and block level, the variation is almost certainly greater. Standardised publication of school-level gender-disaggregated dropout, transition and GPI data would enable local accountability and targeted interventions that aggregate state data cannot support.

Concluding Observations: The Pipeline Looks Different — and More Complex Than Either Narrative

Yes, the education pipeline looks different for girls and boys in India — but not in the way that either the traditional “girls-as-victims” narrative or the emerging “girls-have-overtaken-boys” narrative fully captures. The 2025-26 and 2023-24 data points to a more textured reality.

At school level, girls have genuinely and substantially overtaken boys on every efficiency measure at primary and above. Girls’ dropout is lower at every stage (primary 0.1% vs boys’ 0.4%; secondary 8.0% vs 10.9%). Girls’ transition is higher at every stage — most decisively at Sec→HS (girls 80.7% vs boys 75.5%). Girls’ retention is higher at every cumulative stage — most decisively at HS (girls 55.0%, boys 49.2%). Girls’ GPI exceeds 1.0 at every level from Primary through Higher Secondary, with the widest gaps at Higher Secondary and Upper Primary specifically. This is not a marginal reversal — it is a structural shift in which years of policy effort, programme investment, and changing social attitudes have combined to produce a school system that now retains girls more effectively than boys at the stages that matter most for life outcomes.

At higher education level, women have reached near-parity in aggregate and lead at PG. The GPI of 1.08 for HE is a milestone that would have been aspirational a decade ago. Female PhD scholars have grown far faster than the overall PhD population over the past nine years. SC and ST women have reached or exceeded within-category parity in HE enrolment. These are genuine achievements of inclusion.

The remaining gender gaps are structural, not access-based. Engineering’s persistent underrepresentation of women is not a reflection of girls’ aspirations — it reflects social channelling, family preferences and institutional barriers that make applied technology less accessible to women than to men. University faculty gender gaps are not a reflection of academic talent — they reflect career structures that penalise women for combining research with family roles. Bihar’s girls’ secondary dropout reversal is not a reflection of girls’ lesser determination — it reflects child marriage pressure and a specific failure of secondary-stage social protection for girls in that state. Each of these structural gaps has an identifiable cause and a designable policy response. The aggregate gender story in Indian education is now genuinely positive. The structural story demands continued, targeted attention.

References

Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education (2026). UDISE+ 2025-26 Flash Statistics: Existing Structure Report (Tables 2.1, 5.6, 6.1, 6.13–6.15, 4.13). Released 7 July 2026. udiseplus.gov.in

Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education (2026). All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2023-24. aishe.gov.in

Ministry of Education, Government of India (2020). National Education Policy 2020 (Chapter 6 — Equitable and Inclusive Education). education.gov.in

Ministry of Women and Child Development (2021). Beti Bachao Beti Padhao: Implementation Report 2021. wcd.nic.in

National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration. niepa.ac.in

Suggested Readings from Education for All in India

How to cite: Mehta, A.C. (2026). Gender: Does the Pipeline Look Different for Girls and Boys? A Complete Analysis Using UDISE+ 2025-26 and AISHE 2023-24. educationforallinindia.com.