In the space of a few hours during the bank holiday weekend, I had a stark reminder about the urgent need to get girls into STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. As it’s currently Easter break in the UK, it seems like a good time to remind everyone how much we need to make this fun for girls and encourage them to really consider it. It’s not something just on parents or teachers, but everyone.

This is an area I feel strongly about because, although I’m back working in finance and technology now, it never seemed an obvious or attractive path when I was a teenager despite all the things in my favour. Growing up, I had a mother who worked as a computer software tester, a grandmother who took me on day trips to Bristol Science Museum (not an option right now, I appreciate) and a father and uncles that shared their loves of space, sci-fi and computer games. To start with, that all worked really well – I was excellent at both mathematics and science at school – then something went awry.

Despite the fact my teenage goal in life was becoming a writer, I still started out keeping my academic options open – I’d had mathematics as one of my chosen A-Level subjects. Yet after what felt like a very humiliating moment in class near the start of my first term, rather than getting a supportive chat to get me to stick with the subject, I ended up ditching mathematics for history. I can’t regret the move as I went on to study it at University, but I do wonder what my alternate path might have been.

So what did I see this weekend?

First was the flagging of a Gartner report earlier this year that discussed the predicted 6.2% growth in worldwide IT spending in 2021 to a total of $3.9 trillion. Although there was a dip in 2020 reflecting the pandemic, there was also a huge drive to innovate whilst we worked remotely. Digital businesses really boomed. As we continue to automate and transform, the need for skilled workers in IT will only grow.

This was followed by the World Economic Forum’s report on the gender gap. It states the gap, which was originally going to take 99 years to close, is now set to take 135 years after the pandemic’s impacts added 36 years. It also digs into statistics around how sectors with historically low female representation are those with fast growing “jobs of tomorrow” such as cloud computing at 14%, engineering at 20% and data and AI at 32%. In essence, those specialisms where we are going to need more people are the ones failing to attract women.

The third reminder I came across today was an article about the impact of the class divide. I’ve misplaced the link, but it was only a side reference that was pertinent here – the issue of it being more of a middle class tendency to buy educational toys and that this helps to give those children more of a head start. I don’t know the statistics for social mobility in STEM, but a quick google suggests a study published last year highlighted a lot of work left to do. Right now, educational toys that will reinforce interest and understanding of STEM – the chemistry sets, the make-your-own-robot, the telescopes, the gamified learning – are all more likely to reach middle class children. This puts them further ahead when these “jobs of tomorrow” should be a great opportunity for upwards mobility for the anyone with talent.

The final thing drew the first three together in my mind. When searching on Amazon for ‘make-your-own-robot’ kits, I soon found the label ‘for boys’.

The result is this article as I reflect that we have:

  1. A growing need for a more technically qualified workforce.
  2. A gap between genders that will take over a century to bridge, with worse statistics in technical fields.
  3. A bias toward educational empowerment in the middle class, meaning a magnified disadvantage for working class girls.
  4. Toys that will get children interested in STEM early still geared toward boys.

Fixing this issue requires us to play the long game as individuals in society. Media messaging is clearly still very gendered. Interventions that are designed to yield results after only 5 or 10 years aren’t going to give us a permanent solution. As much as we need to win women back to science and technology, we also need to bring up girls that never leave it. We need to plan for a 15 year benefit horizon when they enter the workforce, and up to 30 years before those women might be hitting leadership positions if none of the short-term interventions work sooner. That’s literally decades, yes, but it’s how we proactively create a sustainable solution rather than continuous remediations.

Of course I acknowledge that appropriate skills are not the only challenge – there is a big culture piece on attracting those women (and non-binary individuals) to male-dominated industries – but all businesses benefit when there’s more talent to go around.

So I’ll end by urging you not to undervalue the opportunity to do something STEM related this break, particularly with girls. Museums might not be open but the edu-tainment is out there if you want it. And as I said before, this isn’t all on parents and teachers – there’s an onus on everyone to have the discussion and change expectation. STEM careers won’t be the right choice for all girls, but more girls need to know there is a choice to make.

If you have ideas for how people can support this agenda, please do leave a comment.

Thanks for reading!