About 50 students could be seen rushing around in the institute campus a little before 10:30 pm. Groups breaking up here and there - an odd person or two getting up, while hastily wrapping up the conversation. But not everyone seemed to be in a hurry to leave- only the girls, who were glancing nervously at their hostel. The girls at my institute were required to be back in their hostel by 10:30 pm, for reasons of 'safety'. The boys, from whom these girls were meant to be 'protected' had no curfew.

I learned about this rule on the first day of college. I accepted it, like all the women before me. We enter an institute or college straight after school with our hearts full of hope. We take a leap of faith:- "We are starting a journey that will prepare us for the world beyond." Our 17-year-old selves don't realise that the system we trust has built-in gender-biased rules.

In a cohort of 4 girls and 18 boys, I was usually the only girl in a group project. More often than not, I found myself making the presentation while the two boys worked in the design studio on the prototype late into the night. In bigger cohorts, girls made their own groups because boys did not want members who would be 'useless’ after 10:30 pm. The college administration had to resort to reserving seats for girls in organising teams for major college events because they were not being selected otherwise. Why should they be if they hadn’t spent nights planning and working the way boys had? 

Students of these colleges will agree that the overall productivity of the college could be improved if the females had the opportunity to add it to it as well. They will also laugh at the irony of being asked to 'collaborate' with the 'other' sex when they were separated via biased rules and moral policing, all through their college lives.

Colleges and hostels are not changing their ways despite the issues their women students are facing. So I’m asking Infosys, one of the most coveted places to work in India, to stand up to colleges with sexist rules- like gender-discriminatory hostel curfews and gender-biased dress codes- by issuing a mandate for conducting placement drives.

Infosys is one of the mass recruiters at engineering college and if Infosys stands with us today, equality will matter to our institutes and will do away with authorising discrimination.

If this is what your college life looked like, please sign the petition.

If this is not what you want college lives to look like, please sign the petition.

If you understand the impact of discrimination on our young minds, please sign the petition.

If you believe in gender equality, please sign the petition.

Through this campaign, we can work together towards the larger picture of bringing gender equality to India.