You could be forgiven for thinking that the focus on getting more women into STEM has resulted in a significant change in representation.
Sadly, it hasn’t happened. Women made up just 15 per cent of people working in STEM-qualified occupations in 2022, despite the STEM workforce growing by approximately 300,000 over the past decade.
Australia’s STEM Ambassador Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith says that organisations need to do more to accelerate progress, and any action taken must be “concerted, coordinated, and evidence-based.”
The new STEM figures come from the Australian Government’s 2023 STEM Equity Monitor released this month.
In better news from the Monitor, the number of students enrolling in STEM subjects in their final year of school is increasing and has nearly reached gender parity.
Meanwhile, there has been an increase in the number of women enrolled in university STEM courses, rising from 31 per cent from 2015 to 2021, compared to a 13 per cent increase for men. But women still only make up 19 per cent of engineering and related technologies enrolments and 21 per cent of information technology enrolments.
Professor Harvey-Smith has been researching to help support how organisations can drive transformative change to support gender equity in STEM. Her office finds that initiatives to drive gender equity in workplaces are most effective when policies and programs are centrally coordinated and used together – which can then offer better oversight, governance and the opportunity for high-quality evaluation and longevity.
The STEM Ambassador’s office has developed several guides and tools to support this work, as well as frameworks for evaluating effectiveness.
On the increase in girls choosing to study STEM subjects in their final year of high school, Harvey-Smith said it highlights the opportunity to engage students much earlier in school.
“There is a tremendous opportunity for every child in Australia to contribute to tackling global challenges like climate change, and it is people with STEM skills who will create the technologies that take us there.