Exhaustion and Scepticism Within The Scientific Community: The Case of Women Scientists and their Peers in India

The article examines the discourse of ‘women in science’ in India, its tendencies to focus on the linear relation between women, science and development and its emphasis on ‘increasing the number of women in science’. By doing so, the paper argues that this emphasis produces two predominant experiences – exhaustion and skepticism – among the scientific work-force in India. It offers an ethnographic account of these two affects and argues that closer attention to such experiences can contribute to the discourse of ‘women in science’, which is caught between failures and achievements of women scientists in India.