Pico2 One of the problems with girls is that they are often good at everything smile. That means that many promising STEM students have to leave behind other subjects at A Level and many choose the other subjects instead. I found choosing A Levels very hard as there was only one GCSE subject that I was happy to see the back of. I wonder if more baccalaureate style post 16 options would help delay this decision making to a more mature age when careers seem more real.
Oh yes, definitely. Still feel a bit bitter that I was only allowed to take 3 subjects at A-level. (None of which were STEM subjects, though I now work in IT.)
Stealthsquiggle To add to the argument that it is something in our education system that causes this drop off - talking to technical women from across Europe, Middle East and Africa, it is only the Western European countries and those like Australia and the US that show this pattern. My colleagues from some middle east countries tell me that engineering degrees are >50% female there.
Yes, it's definitely a cultural issue, at least for IT, but probably all STEM - Northern Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, NZ. The figures are better for other countries. IT (I focus on that, because I work in it) is often seen as a clean job, better than alternatives like agriculture or cleaning.
Anyway, in case anyone's missed me going on about it endlessly, I'm a unix systems admin, and have been for several years. Also do quite a lot of STEM promotion stuff at work, because I don't understand why more women don't want to work in a career that's comparatively well-paid, can have flexible hours and is interesting and varied and always with something new to learn. (Well, I do understand it; it's the male-dominated culture.)
Last week, I went to a BBC Women in Technology event, which was excellent, and raised some useful points. One of the speakers was Kate Russell, who presents Click. She pointed out that a lot of us women who do work in technology are a particular personality type - partly because we've had to be to survive. But what about the women who aren't so sure of ourselves or happy to stand alone?
The time we really need to capture girls' imagination and wish to go into STEM careers is before they take their options - the degrees you can do will be governed by the A-levels you do, and that will have been governed in part by which GCSEs you did - one reason that maths will have higher participation at A-level is partly because it's compulsory to 16, so there's a bigger field of people who can continue it to A-level.
One of the issues is that when you decide at 14 which GCSE options to take, it's at just the age where many people don't want to stand out in the crowd - nearly everything can make you feel self-conscious at that age, and you do have to be particularly determined to want to be the only one or the only one of a minority in the room. Emphasising that we want more girls to take certain subjects can be counter-productive, because it can highlight that girls don't tend to take it, so they are going to stand out if they take that decision. Balance begets balance.
Another issue is image. I think many people are simply unaware of the massive variety of careers available. Science is just in a white coat in a lab. Engineering is in overalls and a hardhat and mud. IT is like the IT crowd. And those people do exist, but there's way, way more. The BBC at the moment has so many roles opening at the moment, in all sorts of areas, because their Future Media division is massively expanding, and they've got jobs with web design, front-end development of iPlayer, red-button, various web pages, programme voting, interactive sports viewing (like they had for the Olympics). They get to see all the latest devices, because iPlayer has to work with them all. Their R&D department was playing with a 3D printer (they get to use it for more serious stuff, too!) They've also got all sorts of internal programs for BBC staff, and there's all the infrastructure behind it, operating systems and hardware. A lot of these jobs are very creative, too, and you have to be able to talk to other people to do them well. (I don't work for the BBC, I should add!) There is just such a massive range, and people often don't realise.
I like the Science Council's list where they categorise 10 types of scientist, to try and give an idea of how many different jobs STEM actually encompasses.
Part of the issue with STEM careers is the image - not just for those considering what career to go into, but for those who advise them. If your daughter were to ask her teacher what sort of careers she could do, would her teacher have a good enough idea of the range of possible careers? Some will - but many won't. Yet how else are children going to find out? I've attended some careers fairs for my employer, and some people go to every stand; some have found out about the companies beforehand and are very focussed, and others are directed by their parents. If their parents aren't aware of your company or what your industry really does, then they may not encourage their child to visit your stall. (Mind you, that might be easier than the ones who are pushed their by their parents = "Go on, Lee! Don't be shy, ask her a question!")
Parents also have a big influence on what careers children go into. When you were thinking about what to do when you grew up, I'm willing to bet that the majority of us will have at least considered the jobs and industries that we'd heard about because it was what our parents did, what our extended family did, what our parents' friends did. I never considered IT because I didn't know anyone working in IT, and we didn't even have a TV. I'd never heard of actuaries until I shared a house with a trainee actuary in my mid-20s. My parents never told me what to do, but the upbringing I had meant I was inclined more towards academic-type careers (my first jobs out of uni were in libraries.) Like it or not, they had instilled their values in me - and my friends show similar patterns. One friend went into retail - her father runs a department store. Another is an engineer, like her father, she did physics A-level - one of my other friends who did physics A-level is a nurse, like her mother. So we need to attract the parents as well as the children. Of course not everyone follows this pattern in the same way, but many do, so we need to educate the parents about what a wide range of STEM careers are available, so that it's part of the things that get talked about at home.
Finally, one of the things that struck me about many of the women I met at the BBC day was the number who hadn't taken a straight path into IT - my first degree is history, and many others had done non-ITish things first. We need to be more open to less traditional paths in; this is difficult with science careers, because you need to build on the knowledge you already have. But it can be possible (the OU would not exist if it were not.) Is it a bad thing to have someone start a career at 40? They're likely to be working for at least another 25 years, which seems a fair investment on any training to me.
The other thing we need to look at here is career breaks - in IT in particular, job roles quite often have requirements for very specific skills, and because things move on quite quickly, if you've been out of the workforce for a couple of years, this can be a major barrier to women returning to work - they weren't there to be on the training courses, and if they can't get back into work, then they aren't going to gain the skills and experience easily. It probably doesn't need to be as difficult as we make it, and if we're going to stop the leaky pipeline, we do need to look at ways round this problem.
I don't know how other STEM careers compare for that aspect, but the more specific the requirements for particular technical skills are, the more of a barrier that is going to be unless we offer more support for returners to work; perhaps if men take up their rights to parental leave, we will be forced to resolve it better than we currently do.
If I were advising someone whose mind is not made up, and they have no clear academic bias, I would advise them to take STEM subjects, simply because it's easier to pick up subjects like languages, history and literature at evening classes and on university outreach programmes and MOOCs and so on. Although MOOCs mean it's also easier to pick up some STEM subjects outside of normal formal education, too. Subject decisions made at school do not set everything in stone forever for those who are determined, which is good, because we do specialise way to early in the UK.
So:
Talking to girls -
- Focus on the benefits (pay, flexibility, variety, learning)
- Focus on the massive variety of STEM careers
- Get the parents on board as well as the children
Talking to employers -
- More flexible ideas about career paths and entry points
- More support for returners to work
Essay over. 