CHENNAI: Last week, reports emerged that NEET aspirants at exam centres in Maharashtra, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu had been subjected to inappropriate frisking, sudden requirements to change their attire or to wear it inside out, and even to being asked to remove their bras.
The same had been reported in Kerala last year. NEET, which has been controversial since its introduction, is a government requirement for those who wish to study medicine at the undergraduate level.
It is a highly competitive and challenging exam. As all students, educators and parents of students are aware – any upset on the day of any such assessment can negatively impact the aspirant’s performance and potentially their future. Naturally, the kind of upset caused by being asked to remove innerwear, in particular, affects women students most.
According to a 2011 study in The Lancet, a leading international medical journal, only 17% of practising allopathic doctors in this country were women; in rural areas, this stood at just 6%. While this data is over a decade old, in the context of how women’s overall workforce participation in India fell to just 19% by 2021 matters.
Moreover, even though women graduate from medical college in greater numbers than men (as more recent data such as from the annual All India Survey of Higher Education reports reveal), and there is gender balance in entry to medical studies, the vast majority of women clearly don’t go on to practise or remain in the field. This is a problem not just for them as individuals, who almost certainly have been robbed of agency or conditioned into making a “choice”, but is even more of a problem for the population at large.
This is not by any means to say that just because a doctor is a woman, she is going to be sympathetic or progressive. We know far too well that this isn’t the case, because the internalised misogyny of women in patriarchal cultures, along with systemic expectations and protocol, are writ large across not only medicine but many other fields in this country. This is only to say: if there were more women who practise as medical doctors, it would mean that there are more women who resisted and were able to surmount pressures from their personal circumstances, which would be indicative of other sociocultural shifts.
The NEET exam is only one of many barriers towards gender inclusivity in medicine, specifically with regards to allopathic doctors (that the nursing profession has always been women-dominated is not denied, and should also be seen in the context of what kinds of careers have been considered acceptable for women, and why). The exam is not even the first barrier – an Indian aspirant to get to the stage where she has been educated enough to and is then allowed to, pursue tertiary studies, she has already met with other obstacles.
That a NEET aspirant would be subjected to humiliations regarding her body and her apparel before or during such an important exam is only one obstacle, yes, but it’s among those that can absolutely be prevented – summarily and officially, far more easily than the extrication of deeper societal malaises.