Over 10,000 women qualified for the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced), or JEE (Advanced), for the first time in six years (2021-2026), coinciding with the Supernumerary Seats Scheme (SSS), which changed their odds of studying at 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
The rise in women qualifiers comes before the admission stage, where the SSS has been in place since 2018. The Common Rank List (CRL) cut-off in 2026 was 92 out of 360, up from 74 in 2025. The qualification rate depends on the marks distribution among candidates and the qualifying threshold fixed for each category. The CRL is the overall merit list based on candidates’ total marks, irrespective of their category.
“The qualifying criteria were relaxed to ensure at least twice the number of candidates qualified as compared to available seats in each category,” the JIC report said. Akshaya Jha, a fourth-year BTech (mineral and metallurgical engineering) student at IIT (ISM) Dhanbad, said SSS is very helpful in motivating women to aim for studying engineering in IITs. “The scheme is creating a community of women engineers who will further motivate other girls to pursue higher studies in engineering.”
A study by Nandana Sengupta and Ravinder Kaur of IIT Delhi and Rohit Munshi of the University of Houston, published in November 2025 in the Springer journal Higher Education, found that before SSS, women constituted 11% to 13% of JEE (Advanced) qualifiers. A considerably smaller proportion of qualified women than men were ultimately entering IITs. The additional women-only seats helped close that gap without reducing the number of seats available to male candidates. The study found post-SSS rank gaps between women-only and gender-neutral seats are smallest for traditionally male-dominated programs. It suggested that high-ranking women are increasingly opting for branches such as computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering.
The study noted that the finding warrants a re-examination of earlier assumptions about gendered preferences in engineering.
