Walk into a nursing classroom in Pokhara today and you’ll find it full of young women. Walk into the engineering workshop next door and you mostly won’t. Ask why, and the answer is almost always the same: things are changing; girls are enrolling in science in numbers nobody saw a decade ago. That part is true. What almost nobody asks is what happens to those young women years later, once the classroom photo has been taken and the harder part of a career begins.
This isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t confined to any one classroom. Across Nepali science generally, women tend to be everywhere at the start of a career and rarer the further along you look. Nursing wards and agriculture departments are full of women, while engineering workshops and forestry stations mostly are not. In Gandaki Province, twenty institutions were asked to break their faculty numbers down by gender: nearly 98 percent of nursing staff were women, close to 89 percent in agriculture, but only around 40 percent in engineering, 30 percent in medicine, 24 percent in allied health sciences, and under 22 percent in forestry. That isn’t an outlier. It’s what the numbers look like the one time somebody actually sat down and counted them.
Visible at the entrance, thinned out by the end
I’m Til Kumari, one of the two people writing this article. I teach botany at Prithvi Narayan Campus in Pokhara, I’m finishing a PhD on turning some of Nepal’s worst invasive weeds into biopesticides, and I’m raising two daughters, all at the same time. On paper, I fall under “agriculture,” one of the disciplines that looks secure. In practice, it isn’t. I’m a botanist, trained to study plants, not to be a statistic inside a broad category that happens to look good on a spreadsheet.
There’s a small detail in my own life that says more than any of those percentages. My PhD is supervised by two men, which isn’t unusual in a department where the undergraduate classes are full of women but the senior professors who eventually sign off on a doctoral thesis are, more often than not, still men. Agriculture looks successful from outside, because the room is full of women. From inside, where the people deciding what counts as good research are mostly not women at all.
The importance of woman in STEM
Being visible doesn’t make the climb any easier, either. I run laboratory work on invasive plant compounds, analyze the data, write the manuscripts, and I’m also the parent expected to be home for two young daughters. No research timeline was built around that. It doesn’t get easier just because the discipline has plenty of women in the classroom. Being in the room and having a say in it are two different things.
Progress that isn’t progress
Some of what looks like progress on paper isn’t really progress. If male enrolment in a discipline falls while female enrolment remains roughly where it was, the female share of that classroom rises even though not a single additional woman walked through the door. The barriers underneath the real numbers are fairly ordinary once you’ve lived through them: money and geography that keep rural or low income girls away from technical fields, old assumptions about which subjects are too hard or too physical for women, and, once a woman is working, professional responsibility stacked on top of nearly all the household responsibility she already had. Women aren’t really choosing to leave these careers. The conditions around them are doing the choosing.
This shows up most clearly among strong students from rural areas. It’s fairly common for a woman to finish a four year STEM degree and still end up in administrative work rather than the technical career the degree was meant for, sometimes because the job never unfolds the way she imagined, sometimes because family pressure arrives the day she marries, carrying the same old assumption that running the household becomes a woman’s real job once she’s married. Many feel pressure to have children before thirty, which aligns with the years when a technical career needs the most momentum, and that alone knocks plenty of them off course. What’s left are a few narrow paths: a small number of civil service posts, a teaching job that usually means a rural posting far from family support, or leaving the country. Faced with three difficult options, many women simply walk away, not for lack of training, but because none of the paths on offer fit the life they’re also expected to build.
Culture that blocks careers
For the women who do stay, the culture awaiting them is a problem in its own right. Men still hold most of the seats where real decisions get made, and women are often given a token spot on some committee, present but rarely deciding anything. One woman we know, who leads a team of junior staff, said her own subordinates routinely call her “bahini” or “nani” instead of her title, a small thing that still chips away at her authority.
Nepal barely tracks any of this to begin with. The handful of numbers above exist only because someone in one province eventually asked twenty institutions to break down their figures by gender, which shouldn’t be remarkable, except that almost nowhere else in the country has bothered to do the same. National conversations about women in STEM default to whichever story is easiest to reach for: the crowded nursing classroom, or the one woman civil engineer working alone on a road crew. Neither is representative. Without real data, there’s no way to know whether scholarships or awareness campaigns are reaching the fields that need them or just landing in fields where women were already welcome.
What would actually move the needle?
None of the actual fixes here are hard to name. Delivering them is the difficult part, since it takes political will sustained over years, not a single press release. Scholarships need to target specific disciplines: a scheme designed with nursing students in mind won’t do much for a rural girl weighing whether forestry is realistic for her. Exposure needs to begin early, well before high school, before stereotypes and low expectations talk a girl out of mathematics and science. And workplaces need real structures, not just good intentions: recognition that means something, leadership roles with real authority attached, and childcare built into research timelines instead of treated as a private problem each woman has to solve alone.
I’m Prayan, the other person writing this piece, and for me mentorship is where this stops being abstract. Right now I’m supervising two master’s students, one in botany and one in zoology, both moving into fields where women thin out long before the senior ranks. What they need from me isn’t special treatment. It’s a supervisor who takes their fieldwork plans as seriously as any male student’s, who doesn’t quietly steer them toward the “safer” project, and who is still around years later when they’re deciding whether to stay in research at all. Til Kumari’s own experience, guided entirely by male supervisors, is a fair picture of what the field looks like right now. What we want is more women ending up on the other side of that relationship, supervising rather than only being supervised. Family support matters just as much, and parental or spousal encouragement is, over and over, the difference between finishing a degree and being pulled out of one halfway through.
None of this requires reinventing Nepal’s education system from the ground up. It means treating a photograph of a classroom and an actual career as two different things, and counting properly, province by province and discipline by discipline, instead of relying on whichever story is closest at hand. The engineering lecturer whose classroom is now half female is right to feel good about that. So is the botanist raising two daughters while running insecticide trials after her students have gone home. But both of them, and the country watching them, should also ask what that picture looks like ten years from now: how many of those young women are still doing the work, still being promoted, still supervising theses of their own. Until the answer is as encouraging as today’s enrolment numbers, Nepal’s STEM story remains the same one it has always been: a story that starts well and quietly loses its women along the way.
(Til Kumari Chhetri is an assistant professor of botany at Prithvi Narayan Campus, Pokhara, and a doctoral student at Tribhuvan University. Prayan Pokharel holds a PhD in chemical ecology and works as a Researcher and Education & Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Environmental and Sustainable Agricultural Research (CESAR), Pokhara.)
