Women outdid men in civil services exam in 2019: UPSC – Times of India

The higher selection rate of women, vis a vis men who qualified for the interview, cuts across all categories like general, SC, ST, OBC and economically weaker sections (EWS). However, in absolute terms, the 1,510 women candidates who took the interview as part of CSE-2019 were far outnumbered by their 9,964 male counterparts. Of these, 220 women were recommended for various civil services including IAS, IPS etc, as against 702 successful male candidates.

As per the UPSC annual report for 2020-21 released last week, of the 922 candidates recommended for civil services based on CSE-2019, 63.1% were from engineering background (up from 62.7% in CSE-2018), 24.2% from humanities (down from 24.5%), 6.6% from science (down from 6.9%) and 6% from medical science background (up from 5.9%).
Interestingly, despite 63.1% of the recommended candidates being engineers, only 4.7% had opted for engineering as their optional subject in mains exam. The optional subject of a whopping 82.6% of the recommended candidates related to the humanities stream. This shows that most of the candidates continue to make a cross-domain shift from their original stream (i.e., engineering and medical science) to humanities.

The UPSC report for 2020-21 does not contain information on CSE-2020 as its results had not been declared until March 31, 2021.

An analysis of educational qualifications of the interviewed CSE candidates shows that the success rate of those above graduate level (44.2%) was higher than that of graduate candidates (38.7%). While 672 (72.9%) of those recommended to civil services were graduates, 250 (27.1%) possessed post-graduate or higher qualifications.

Over 11.35 lakh candidates had applied for the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination, 2019, of which only 5.68 lakh (50.1%) actually appeared. As many as 11,474 candidates qualified for the mains examination, and 2,302 appeared for the interview. Finally, 922 candidates were recommended by the UPSC for various civil services.

Geography was the most preferred among optional subjects for the mains exam, followed by political science & international relations. Amongst the subjects opted by 100 or more candidates, the highest percentage of successful candidates opted for Kannada language literature (13.7%) followed by Malayalam language literature.

While the candidates appearing for mains who chose Hindi literature as their optional subject fell to 191 from 236 in 2018 exam, English literature was optional subject for 31 candidates as against 21 in CSE-2018. The highest percentage (27.2%) of male candidates recommended, were from the age group of 26-28 years (unlike CSE-2018 when most were from 24-26 age group), while the highest percentage (32.3%) of the successful female candidates were between 24 and 26 years.

While 55.5% of candidates appeared for the prelims exam in 2019 in their first attempt, only 7.7% of finally qualified candidates could clear the examination in their first attempt. In the second, third and fourth attempts, the percentage of recommended candidates was 16.5%, 19.7% and 19.9% respectively.