The gender gap in STEM continues to prevail – with women representing just 29.4% of the STEM workforce. This under-representation is present across the globe, from schools right through to senior professionals, with boys traditionally more likely to choose STEM subjects and study STEM degrees. In fact, only 35% of STEM students in higher education in the UK are women.
Georgina Harris, the Dean of the Faculty of STEM at Arden University, explores why gender disparity in STEM is so strong, explaining the importance of practical work and exposure to the STEM industry from a young age.
Why the gender gap exists
The gender gap in STEM is not about ability, but more about implicit bias and stereotypes. In fact, research shows that women typically outperform men in engineering fields of study. Across the UK, many people associate science, maths and engineering fields with ‘male’ and humanities or arts with ‘female’. This commonplace, implicit bias affects individuals’ attitudes to others and also their self-belief.
PwC’s Women in Tech report highlighted some of the main factors influencing women away from studying STEM subjects, including being better at more essay-based subjects, not finding STEM subjects as interesting and STEM subjects not being as relevant to the career they are working towards.
When we consider the fact that the STEM industry is male-dominated, which often perpetuates inflexible, exclusionary cultures that do not attract or support women’s careers, the reasoning behind the long-standing gender gap in the industry becomes clearer.
In the UK, we are in desperate need of STEM specialists at every level to close the widening skills gap. In spite of the rapidly expanding engineering and technology sector, we are also facing the worrying prospect of having insufficient engineers to keep pace with talent gaps created as people retire from the industry. With many talented individuals able to find higher salaries in other countries, or in other industries using transferrable skillsets, how can engineering plug the ever-widening skills gap?
Closing the gap – starting with education
For many years, schools have been faced with the challenge of delivering education on a shoestring budget. With suitably talented, specialist teachers being difficult to find in mathematics- and science-based subjects, often, schools do not have sufficient funding to attract this scarce pool of talent. This means they also often miss out on offering expert career advice and guidance that covers the broad and rich range of opportunities available in STEM.
Additionally, many UK schools have had to minimise the practical, experimental and manufacturing activities that often encourage students to consider choosing STEM subjects. In my experience, students gain so much from taking on a challenge that – as yet – has no solution. For an engineer or scientist in the real world, this opportunity to solve a puzzle before anyone else is intoxicating.
In the UK, schools are also locked in perpetual competition with neighbouring schools, causing many school leaders to prioritise league table outcomes over the needs of individual students. This means young people, who could improve their career prospects by taking mathematics or science subjects, are frequently encouraged to take another subject, which may see them achieve a higher grade. This is ultimately dissuading young people from studying STEM subjects and disadvantaging those who want to pursue a career in STEM.
To tackle the issue, the STEM industry also needs more government support, which would enable students to experience more practical work and exposure to STEM subjects. This would open up STEM to every student, enabling them to experience the industry for themselves – and not just through the perpetuated gender bias and stereotyped beliefs.
When given the opportunity to learn more about it, many students are surprised to learn how STEM can apply to so many different industries and careers – and for girls, who often pick subjects based on career prospects, this enables them to see how their aspirations to make the world a better place are possible through a career in STEM.
Moving into university
With students seeing minimal exposure to practical work at school, universities and their industry partners have a key role to play in nurturing new STEM recruits to give them the confidence, experience and feedback they need to succeed in STEM.
At Arden University, an essential ingredient of our successful model is the use of authentic assessments and ongoing engagement with companies to develop our programmes. This offers two key advantages – the opportunity to experience the highs and lows of design and development in a nurturing environment, and the opportunity to try working on different projects for real companies. This gives students the confidence to go on to apply their learning in the working world, an important aspect of retaining new entrants in the field.
For companies in the field, engaging with universities not only strengthens the quality of upcoming talent in the industry, but also builds an organisation’s profile and showcases its opportunities to students who are looking towards a career in STEM.
As an engineering and technology community, we need to work together to reignite enthusiasm for our discipline by nurturing learners at every stage of their education. To meet demand, we need creative, resilient and engaged engineers, who reflect the diverse society they serve.
