The World needs more women in STEM

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook; STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) powers all these giants.

These four interdisciplinary subjects are more important today than at any point in human history. The increased momentum in growth, integration, and competition of the global economy has only served to fan the flame around the debate on the increasing importance of, and competitiveness in, STEM-related fields.

STEM professionals form the backbone of every modern industry. These people built telescopes that allow us to peer into hidden worlds, invented machines that dragged the world into the Industrial Age, develop vaccines to fight highly infectious diseases, created the Internet, and construct the impressive skylines that define our cities today. Several industry insights confirm that careers in such fields remain the most lucrative and sought after in the world. This isn’t simply because they out-earn all other non-STEM fields by up to 30 per cent. Today, many countries are in the midst of acute shortages of STEM professionals.

According to the Smithsonian Science Education Centre, an upwards of 2.4 million STEM jobs went unfilled in 2018 alone.

Between 2000 and 2010, STEM jobs tripled the growth rate of non-STEM jobs. This is quite impressive considering the fact that the rate of growth of STEM jobs between theIndustrial Revolution and the turn of the new millennium only doubled. There seems to be an exponential growth in demand for STEM-related jobs.

Between 2017 and 2027, the ‘Education Commission of the United States’ estimates STEM jobs will grow at 13percent compared to other jobs at 9 per cent. However in the middle of all this growth, in a particularly vibrant and disruptive field, women only make up about 24% in the UK, in the US 1 in 7 engineers is a woman, and in KenyaSTEM participation shows a clear gender disparity ranging from 30%-35%. All these statistics beg the question: if there is so much room in STEM, why are women so severely underrepresented?

How We Got Here

Women have had the short end of the stick when it came to conventional employment since the beginning of recorded history. To make matters worse STEM jobs have been predominantly male-dominated. This does not mean that women have deliberately avoided STEM fields. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; women have been actively involved in STEM and made significant contributions. You will be forgiven if you’ve never heard of the following women before:

• Donna Strickland – 2018 recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics.

• Margaret Hamilton – pioneer developer of NASA’s Apollo 11 flight software.

• Nettie Stevens – discovered sex chromosomes in 1905.

• Henrietta Leavitt – astronomer whose efforts helped scientists understand the nature of stars today.

• Marie Curie – pioneering research in radioactivity earned her a Nobel Prize in 1903.

• Maria Goeppert-Mayer – earned a Nobel Prize for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus.

• Ada Lovelace – developed the first machine algorithm

While this list is a testament to the accomplishments of women in STEM, hundreds more go without any recognition for their hard-earned achievements.

This is the peril that faces women working in male-dominated STEM fields, that they risk being under-credited or outright cheated off their accomplishments. The Austrian physicist Lisa Meitner wasn’t recognized despite co-discovering nuclear fission; Cecilia Payne discovered the composition of stars but it was her supervisor who got the recognition, and Vera Rubin wasn’t recognized for co-discovering dark matter. This is a common theme in all STEM fields, especially prior to the 21st century. We can only assume that, despite the noted achievements of women in STEM, such egregious lack of recognition makes other women doubt their place in STEMrelated fields.

Microsoft conducted a study across Europe in 2017 and discovered that girls become interested in STEM at 11 years but lose this interest by age 15. The reasons ranged from the lack of female role models in STEM to little hands-on approach for girls in STEM subjects.

Sixty per cent said it would help their confidence if there were equal employment for men and women in STEM-related jobs. Of course, this isn’t the case. Additionally, young girls are often actively discouraged from pursuing STEM subjects because they are ‘for boys’.

Such engendered societal stereotypes and implicit biases already make them lose interest from the onset, and even undermines their performance in STEM careers in case they choose to pursue them later on. Other stereotypes about STEM-related jobs, that they isolate people or lead to a very poor work-life balance for professionals, may also have contributed to the low numbers of women in STEM. Other women claim to be unaware of opportunities instead of them. Regardless of the reasons, countless studies have established that the attitude of girls and women towards STEM is generally negative.

The Solutions

UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics shows that female researchers account for less than 30 per cent worldwide. In order to improve female representation in STEM-related careers, the solution must begin at the root of the problem: the education and socialization of young girls. The first step to remedy this is to debunk the myth that girls and women dislike STEM-related subjects and careers. Teach girls that their intellectual skills are just as important as their soft skills: sustained effort should be put into helping them realize their career-relevant skills. In order to inspire these girls, the achievements of women in STEM should be widely-broadcasted, just like their male counterparts.

In college, institutions should actively encourage girls to select STEM majors. They should be able to understand the real world applications of STEM courses. More support, whether financial, material or socially, should be afforded to girls who choose to pursue STEM courses. These include mentorship programs and career events, grants and fellowships, and other forms of targeted outreach to encourage the women to complete the courses and transition to STEM-related careers. In the industry, companies should develop new performance appraisal systems to eliminate the toxic competition atmosphere between colleagues. Additionally, employers should support women in childbearing instead of forcing them to sacrifice either their careers or personal life.

The City Park Foundation started Green Girls in 2002, a science program whose aim is to instil confidence in girls during their early education. This has helped increase the number of women in environmental science careers. In Kenya, UNESCO runs the annual Scientific Camps ofExcellence for Mentoring Girls in STEM to increase highschool girls’ enrolment in STEM. Business Daily reports that the number of women in STEM increased by 10.88percent from 2016 to 21,400 in 2017, indicating a steady tightening of the gender gap.

A Paradox

A number of countries have managed to implement various solutions to reduce the gender gap in STEM. However, the results weren’t as expected. Research by PsychologicalScience in 2018 showed that gender equality allowed women to avoid pursuing careers in science if they weren’t interested. The study suggested that the gender gap still existed and actually increased because girls go for other alternatives to STEM. It concluded that the data painted the “different inherent abilities” between men and women. This is the gender equality paradox; that the higher the level of gender equality in the country, the lower the fewer women go into STEM.

Which Way Forward?

Parades aside, the need for more women in STEMisn’t just a question of diversity, it’s a matter of the quality of innovation too. Women form half of the human population and have insights based on what they've experienced. In the 1960s, the team at IBM didn't know how to get a magnetic strip on the credit card until an engineer’s wife suggested that they just iron it to the card.

We are also on the cusp of the Fourth IndustrialRevolution. It is untenable that women still occupy just a paltry 28 per cent of STEM-related jobs.

The UN set the 11th of February as the International Day for Women and Girls in Science. This is an important annual reminder that women should also be at the forefront of building an inclusive future.

The jobs of the future are going to be produced by innovations in STEM and the input of women is crucial in shaping a world that is reflective of the society we live in. If the huge gender gap in STEM persists, it is highly likely that it will widen, leading to consequences that the world will no longer have the luxury of ignoring.

“We know that just freeing the potential of women is the biggest multiplier we have seen in terms of our growth.” Valentine Rugwabiza, Rwandan Ambassador to the UN.