As we celebrate once again the International Women & Girls in Science Day, I got curious about the numbers behind the female representation and contributions to the science, technology, engineering, and data fields.

The first thought that comes to mind is that for a world facing a shortage of skills in technological fields, seeing women – whom roughly make half of the world’s population – accounting only for 28% of engineering graduates and 40% of graduates in computer science and informatics, simply doesn’t make sense. More so when the interest in ‘women in science’ and ‘girls in science’ continues to trend upwards:

International Women & Girls in Science Day Interest by Google search volume (Credits: Tech Conversationalist)

The challenge starts early on for women and girls in science

The challenge starts early on, with many girls been discouraged from pursuing their interest in subjects such as Math or Physics. By the time students reach college, women are significantly underrepresented in STEM majors as per data compiled by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics. For example, women in the U.S. make a little over a fifth (21%) of engineering majors and just 19% of computer and information science majors.

Women’s participation varies across STEM disciplines. While women have nearly reached gender parity in biomedical sciences, they still make up only about 18% of students receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science, for instance, highlights The Conversation. One factor that influences and contributes to perpetuate the gender bias in STEM is the use of the labels such as “soft science” or “hard science”, according to recent research. Across studies, participants were consistently more likely to describe a discipline as a “soft science” when they’d been led to believe that proportionally more women worked in the field. Moreover, the “soft science” label led people to devalue these fields – describing them as less rigorous, less trustworthy and less deserving of federal research funding.

The churn gets real after females with STEM majors enter the workforce:  38% of women who major in computers work in computer fields while just 24% of those who majored in engineering work in the engineering field. In the meantime, the majority of the healthcare workforce (nearly 80%) are women. Paradoxically, female representation in this field is higher in lower-paying fields, such as home health workers, nurses and the lower-paying specialties such as pediatricians. Still in healthcare, only about 21% of executives and board members are women and,  while numbers improve a bit for female doctors (a third.)

To be a successful reality, the digital revolution needs to be inclusive

The glass ceiling doesn’t help either:  In late 2020, just 15% of CTOs at FTSE 100 firms were women, according to  research by developer recruitment platform CodinGame. GSK is one of the three firms in the top 10 by market capitalisation that have female CTOs, alongside AstraZeneca and British American Tobacco.  Furthermore, in general, men in STEM annual salaries are nearly $15,000 higher per year than women ($85,000 compared to $60,828). And Latina and Black women in STEM earn around $33,000 less (at an average of around $52,000 a year) than their male peers.

For the digital revolution to be smart (and successful!) it must be inclusive. We still have a long way to go. Despite the improvement seen over the past three decades, women in science careers are still facing gender bias ranging from pay gap to devaluation of those fields where women and girls are closer to reach gender representation parity (let’s talk about the ‘pink collar’ jobs in another post, shall we?)