Girls Have a Higher Success Rate, but Boys Dominate the 690+ NEET Club

When the National Testing Agency declared the NEET-UG 2026 results on July 16, the headline numbers told a story that has become familiar in India's medical entrance examination: women, once again, outperformed men — comfortably. But scratch beneath the aggregate figures, and a second, more persistent story emerges. At the very summit of the merit list, among the small, elite band of candidates who cross 690 marks out of 720, boys continue to hold the upper hand. The paradox — girls winning the war, boys winning the peaks — has now repeated itself for several years running, and this year's results offer a fresh opportunity to examine why.

The Headline Numbers

Nearly 20 lakh candidates appeared for NEET-UG 2026, sitting the exam across 5,440 centres in 551 Indian cities and 14 international locations. Of these, 11.21 lakh qualified for admission to undergraduate medical, dental, AYUSH and allied health programmes — and women made up the clear majority of that qualifying pool, accounting for more than 58 per cent of all successful candidates.

The gender gap in qualification rates, while narrower than the headline share suggests, was still measurable and consistent: 56.8 per cent of female candidates who appeared for the exam qualified, compared to 55.1 per cent of male candidates. In absolute terms, female qualifiers (6,54,049) outnumbered male qualifiers (4,67,134) by a wide margin nationally — a gap driven as much by the sheer scale of female participation as by the marginally higher pass rate.

This is not a one-off. Women have outnumbered men in NEET registrations for years now, and their qualification rate has, in most recent cycles, edged ahead of men's. In NEET-UG 2025, 1.31 million women appeared for the exam compared to 965,000 men. In 2022, female candidates qualified in far greater numbers than male candidates — 5,63,902 against 4,29,160 — out of a registered pool where women already outnumbered men by more than 2.5 lakh.

Where the Numbers Flip

Yet the closer one looks at the top of the rank list, the more the picture changes. This year, 138 candidates crossed the 690-mark threshold, and 26 of them scored above 690 with 17 state toppers breaching the 700-mark barrier. The two highest scores in the country — 715 out of 720 — were jointly claimed by Aryan Gupta of Punjab and Panshul Bansal of Haryana, both young men. Among this ultra-elite cohort, 93 per cent were first-time NEET takers and 99 per cent fell between the ages of 17 and 19 — suggesting the very top of the exam is disproportionately won by young, first-attempt aspirants, a group that appears to skew male at these extreme heights.

This is consistent with the pattern of previous years. In NEET-UG 2025, the all-India topper, Mahesh Kumar of Rajasthan, scored 686 marks; the highest-ranked woman, Delhi's Avika Aggarwal, secured All India Rank 5 — a strong finish, but still behind three male candidates at the very top. In 2024, reports at the time noted plainly that male candidates "outshined" female candidates in securing the highest individual ranks, even as 67 candidates jointly claimed AIR 1 with a near-identical percentile score. In 2023, the top three ranks nationally went to men, and in 2022, only 16 of the top 50 rank holders were women — despite women comprising the majority of all qualifiers that year.

A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

Taken together, the last several NEET cycles reveal a consistent structural pattern rather than a single year's statistical quirk:

Women dominate the base of the pyramid. They register in greater numbers, appear in greater numbers, and qualify — both in absolute terms and, in most recent years, at a marginally higher rate — than men.

Men dominate the peak of the pyramid. Among the tiny fraction of candidates scoring above 690, or claiming the top all-India ranks, male candidates have secured a disproportionate share nearly every year this decade.

Several education analysts and coaching-industry observers point to a mix of possible explanations, though none is fully settled. One is the geography and culture of "topper factories" — coaching hubs like Kota in Rajasthan and Sikar, which have historically produced a large share of India's highest NEET scores and have traditionally drawn a heavily male cohort of long-term, multi-year repeaters chasing rank rather than mere qualification. This year's data offers a partial echo of that: while 93 per cent of the 690+ club were first-timers nationally, past toppers such as Mahesh Kumar spent up to three years preparing intensively at Sikar-based institutes before their breakthrough attempt.

Another explanation offered is behavioural: exam-strategy research in high-stakes testing environments has repeatedly suggested that male candidates are, on average, somewhat more likely to guess on marginal questions and take on the risk of negative marking in pursuit of a handful of extra marks — a strategy that can pay off in the tightly bunched score bands near the top of the distribution, where a handful of correct guesses can be the difference between an all-India rank in double digits and one in the hundreds. Female candidates, by contrast, are often reported to adopt more conservative, accuracy-first strategies — a pattern that plausibly helps explain a wide, dependable qualification base but fewer forays into the highest-risk score territory.

A third, more structural factor is representation within elite quotas. The Re-NEET 2026 female toppers list showed Maharashtra's KudaleShravani Krishna as the highest-ranked woman nationally, with All India Rank 5 and a 99.99965 percentile — placing her not just as the top female candidate but as the highest-ranked OBC-NCL candidate overall. Notably, the women's topper list this year leaned heavily toward OBC-NCL and General-category candidates from states such as Haryana and Tamil Nadu, which tied for the most representation with three candidates each in the top 20 — a reminder that state-level coaching ecosystems and category-wise competition dynamics shape outcomes as much as gender does.

The Bigger Picture

For all the attention the 690+ club draws each results season, doctors, educators and policymakers argue that the more consequential story is the one playing out at scale, not at the summit. With women now comprising a majority of NEET qualifiers for several consecutive years, India's future physician workforce is being reshaped from the entry point upward — a shift with implications for healthcare delivery, particularly in fields like obstetrics, gynaecology and paediatrics, and in improving women's access to female practitioners in conservative or rural settings.

At the same time, the persistence of a male-dominated top tier raises its own questions — about whether coaching ecosystems, repeat-attempt cultures, and risk-taking incentives embedded in the exam's design inadvertently favour a narrow, male-skewed path to the very highest scores, even as the exam as a whole increasingly rewards and reflects the aspirations of India's young women.

As the qualified candidates from NEET-UG 2026 now move into the counselling process — coordinated nationally by the Medical Counselling Committee for All India Quota seats and by respective state authorities for state-quota seats — the numbers leave behind a portrait of an exam in transition: broadly more female, but, at its rarefied peak, still stubbornly male.

(Email: aggrawalgarg@gmail.com)