SUNS  4324 Monday 16 November 1998

New Delhi, Nov 12 (IPS/Dev Raj) -- Taking advantage of traditional male disdain for the biological sciences, Indian women are making a mark in the rapidly growing area of biotechnology.

As with the rest of the world, science in India is gendered with male scientists overwhelmingly dominating subjects like mathematics and engineering.

But male neglect of biology and the life sciences have not only allowed women to carve out a niche for themselves in the subject but also create a bias in favour of women researchers in such rarefied areas as molecular biology.

"Women are naturally more methodical and precise - these qualities are handy for the painstaking research that biotechnology demands," says Rajni Rani, a scientist at the National Institute of Immunology (NII).

Rani cites the example of her two daughters who are following in her footsteps because "they are more attentive to their studies than boys usually are."

Rani who, along with another woman scientist Rama Mukerjee, created 'Leprovac' the world's first successful vaccine against leprosy also thinks that women have a better sense of the practical.

"Women are happy to work on projects which directly contribute to human well-being and what better area than the life-sciences," she said explaining the phenomenon of female domination over biotechnology in this country.

But Vandana Shiva, a leading biotechnologist and expert on food security thinks different. "Given the chance women would do just as well as men in any field - it is just that there was a vacant space in the biological sciences which women filled out."

Shiva thinks that there is now a reverse situation where there is actually a gender bias in favour of women in such areas as molecular biology. "My son could not find a seat for himself although he has the aptitude," she said. "Men seem to have lost out on an important field simply through false notions of what constitutes privilege and what doesn't," Shiva said illustrating her theory with an example from the Garhwal mountains of northern Uttar Pradesh where she conducts farm research.

For centuries men in the Garhwal region were content to sit around and smoke their hookahs (communal pipes) and corner rice cultivation while leaving the cheaper but more nutritious cereals for the women.

"The result is that today women in the Garhwal are far sturdier than the men in a classic example of a less privileged group gaining by default," Shiva said.

Whether Shiva's argument is valid in the case of academics or not, the fact remains that nearly 70% of students applying and gaining admission to courses in higher studies in the biological sciences are women.

"We plan to encourage this trend and remove the usual barriers that women face in science," says Manju Sharma, secretary in the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and currently president of the prestigious Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA).

To begin with, laboratories under the DBT are set to allow women time off for marriage and child rearing without loss to their academic careers. "Wherever possible we will encourage them to come back into research rather than drop out," she said.

The DBT recently launched a series of "Biotechnology Programmes for Women," to speed up the process of rural development, where women biotechnologists can be readily absorbed.

"Women constitute 80% of the work force in India's agriculture and biotechnology offers a tremendous opportunity to involve women at different levels in addressing the problem of mass poverty," Sharma said.
An example of the DBT's 'lab-to-land' efforts using women can be had in the unique 'Women's Biotechnology Park' in the city of Chennai (Madras) in southern Tamil Nadu state. "The concept is that the park would act as a joint-venture enterprise where individual entrepreneurs would be
shareholders with the park providing infrastructure and selecting appropriate biotechnologies for them," she said.

Subita Srimal represents one of several women biotechnologists assisted by the DBT in setting up viable enterprises on their own through large loans.

As a young researcher, four years ago Srimal studied the properties of blood from horseshoe crab especially its ability to detect biological contamination and even accurately determine the level of contamination.

Today Srimal's firm in the southern city of Bangalore Manukirti commercially produces a reagent for detecting bacterial activity in sample of intravenous fluids at a fraction of what imported reagents
cost.

Srimal said being a woman scientist has been more of an advantage than anything else. "Sometimes I felt patronised but that is part of the game."