STEM

Successes and Failures – reflections on women’s progress in 2019

10 March, 2020 By WiC

Liz Walker, Commercial Director at Distinctly, reflects on the successes and failures for women in 2019.

Like any year, 2019 has been a mixture of successes and failures for women’s rights. This is true whether we are talking about the rights of women in employment, women in the wider UK, or for women worldwide. One of the truly positive notes to come from the December 2019 Westminster election was that this Parliament has the most female MPs in history, and for the first time, more than a third of MPs are women. On the other hand, women at intersections with other minority groups, for instance LGBT women or women with disabilities, are facing a more hostile working and living environment than ever before. For International Women’s Day 2020, while we need to celebrate the great strides that have been made, we must also discuss the room for improvement that remains.

Successes

Highest proportion of women in work ever

One of the most positive statistics this year was that in August, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced that the number of women in employment was at its highest level in history, at 15.46 million. This number has continued to rise into early 2020, with a new record already established at 15.61 million women in employment, equating to 72.4% of the women’s labour market. This continuing growth in women’s employment highlights that employers are becoming far better at hiring female candidates. Given that this growth in women in employment is credited with the growth in the UK economy that has occurred since 2012, this is a fantastic note of positivity.

Rise in working mothers

A major driving factor behind the growth of women in employment is that mothers are now far more likely to continue working, with approximately 72% of working-age mothers now remaining in paid work. While there is still a tendency for women who are parents to move from full-time to part-time work, this is still a positive trend, and has helped lead to a massive rise in the number of dual-earning families. This is believed to have been driven by a rise in flexible working opportunities.

1 in 3 FTSE 100 directors are now women

For the first time in history, 1 in 3 individuals on the boards of FTSE 100 companies are women. While this number falls behind target for the wider FTSE 350, this is still a fantastic growth given that only a decade ago women made up only 12.5% of FTSE 100 board members. With a growth in women in leadership roles, we can expect changes in wider workplace culture to continue at an ever accelerating rate. However, we still need to bear in mind that this is only the start of the change that is needed. The report also stresses the fact that some roles, such as finance directors, are still well below the 33% target, showing there is still significant room for improvement.

Failures

Statistics fail to show underlying problems

Unfortunately, while there are some very positive statistics for 2019, they fail to account for some underlying structural problems. First, women are still expected to be the primary provider of childcare, carrying out 60% more unpaid work than men, especially in terms of childcare provision. This is partly influenced by the fact that Shared Parental Leave, designed to allow parents to split the workload of looking after their newborn between them, has seen abysmal uptake. Only 9,200 new parents used the scheme in 2017/18, which was just over 1% of those eligible, highlighting the fact that cultural changes around childcare are far from complete. This has certainly not been helped by the fact that the cost of childcare for children under 2 has risen by 5%, meaning that in attempting to return to work, many women would actually be incurring a financial cost.

Similar socio-cultural issues can be seen elsewhere — for instance, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), women are still expected to undertake the majority of housework. This is believed to be a major factor behind many parents not taking up full-time roles when they return to work, even where it has a major impact on their pay. These underlying cultural problems are being slowly eroded, but they are still impacting the ability of working women to work in the roles they would like to, due at least in part to the need to balance their responsibilities as primary caregiver to their children against pursuing their careers.

Women are still facing pay-based discrimination, even in government

Mandatory gender pay gap reporting has now existed for companies with 250 employees and above for three years. Despite this fact, women are still routinely being paid less than their male colleagues, with little change to the 11% average pay difference seen over the past two years. Even women employed directly by the government, who purport to be looking to end discrimination against women, are failing to be paid an equal wage for the work they do. While 13 of the 18 government departments large enough to conduct reporting had managed to decrease their gender pay gap, one saw no change, and the remaining four saw an increase. Of the 18 departments, only one, the Department for Work and Pensions, had no reported gender pay gap. This raises serious questions about how the government could possibly hope to succeed in changing the private sector pay gap when it is busy failing its female employees.

Women in niche industries are still being failed by employers

Across the STEM and creative industries, women are still being left behind. While there are definitely positives, such as the number of women engineers doubling in the past decade, and 1 million women now working in STEM occupations, this shift has not been occurring consistently. In some sectors within STEM, women have actually dropped as a percentage of the workforce despite increased numbers, due to an even higher number of men entering these fields. A good example of this is Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) managers, where despite growing every year since 2015, the number of women in SET has dropped heavily as a percentage.

In fact, between June 2018 and June 2019, over 300,000 men entered STEM employment, compared with only 150,000 women. With men thus offering an even larger proportion of the overall talent pool, they are statistically more likely to receive promotions and pay rises, further contributing to the marginalisation of women in the STEM workforce.

This same struggle can be seen in the creative industries. Despite a 30.6% growth in the creative industries between 2011 and 2018, women still make up only 37% of the employees, with a growth rate of under 3% in the past 6 years. Between 2017 and 2018, the number of women in creative fields actually dropped, despite overall growth. Clearly, despite the fact that the picture across the wider workforce looks so positive, for women in STEM or the creative industries, there is a lot of work still to be done. As two major growth industries in the UK for the past decade, continued domination of these fields by men implies that — without major changes — gender imbalance in the UK economy is likely to persist for a long time.

See also Visualizing the data: Women’s representation in society (released by the UN)

Tech Talent Charter releases gender diversity report

24 January, 2019 By WiC

TechCharter — Image: David Parry/PA Wire

The Tech Talent Charter (TTC) recently launched its inaugural benchmarking Report – the first report of its kind tracking gender diversity in technology roles across the UK.

Gathered from over 200 signatories representing over half a million employees, the data gives a snapshot of today’s tech industry and an insight into practical ways companies can improve it:

● Across signatories women hold 26% of technical roles compared with 19% UK wide – micro businesses are found to be the most gender diverse with women holding 53% of technical roles
● 71% of signatories already have active diversity and inclusion policies as part of their recruitment approach. 27% don’t, but are putting them in place in the next year.
● 36% of signatories already have policies in place to increase the number of women included in interview shortlists, with 32% saying they will be adding this in 2019
● 57% of signatories outsource some or all of their technical roles

The current state of play

Across the signatories, women hold 26% of the technical roles. Looking at the workforce of signatories more broadly, women make up 34.9% of the signatories’ workforces compared to the wider digital tech workforce average of 19%.

When broken down into job roles, it is clear that there remains specific technology specialisms where women are less represented. User-centered design had the highest proportion of women (48%) and Engineer and Programmer had the lowest proportion (15%). There were no surprises here, as it is well known that the engineering sector specifically struggles to attract and retain women.

Industrywide – % of positions held by women

User-centered design – 48%
Production and delivery roles – 33%
Data roles – 31%
QAT analyst roles – 26%
IT operations roles – 25%
Engineer/Programmer roles – 15%

Does size matter in gender diversity?

The data collected shows clear differences between the size of an organisation and its gender representation in technology roles. However, there is no clear trend between size and gender representation. Surprisingly, micro-companies had the highest representation with 53% of all technical roles held by women, in comparison with small companies at 20%, medium at 23% and large at 19%.

Debbie Forster, CEO Tech Talent Charter comments

We are delighted to see our smaller companies challenging assumptions that they are too small or too busy to focus on diversity. This report clearly shows every size and type of company can and must become more inclusive and diverse.

The key is learning from each other. At our events across the country our smaller companies are helping larger companies find ways of ‘thinking like a start-up’, to pilot smaller scale-approaches and then scaling them, rather than waiting to create the perfect solution and then trickle it down.”

Phasing out all-male job interview shortlists

Data were also collated on the efforts made by signatories to rollout gender inclusion and diversity policies.

The overwhelming majority of the Charter’s signatories have an active policy in place already (70.71%) or plan to roll out such policies in the coming year (27.27%). Over a third (36%) of signatories also already have policies in place to increase the number of women in included in interview shortlists, with 32% saying they will be adding this in 2019. The remaining 2% of signatories – those without policies in place or planned – gave a variety of reasons why this was the case, primarily that diversity and inclusion underpins their approach to recruitment already and they see no need for a formal policy.

Debbie Forster, CEO Tech Talent Charter continues

We believe that, first and foremost, any policy that is implemented should align with a company’s unique culture. If a policy cannot fully capture company culture, businesses should focus on identifying the metrics and measurements that will set them up for sustainable progress. Our members know that if you genuinely build an inclusive culture, diversity will follow. Policies can and should underpin culture but the culture is the essential component.

Focus for 2019

The report also reveals over half (57%) of signatories outsource all or some of their technology roles to a third party, highlighting that companies need to look beyond their own walls to ensure gender parity.

As the Charter develops and expands, The Tech Talent Charter will work more closely with the outsourcing companies. There is a responsibility for employers who are calling for meaningful diversity in their own teams to also be aware of the diversity within their supply chain, and ask more of their outsourcing partners.

Debbie Forster, CEO Tech Talent Charter added,

We’re delighted to publish our TTC toolkit. For the first time, we’re bringing together sector-wide data that is not just a restating of the problem – it allows companies to measure their own practice against others and to learn from each other to create solutions. We’re also painstakingly documenting existing best practice from across the sector and the huge range of organisations, initiatives and schemes businesses can work with to drive inclusion and diversity themselves.

All the work the Tech Talent Charter has done with its UK wide members to pinpoint the policies and practices that can really move the dial on gender diversity in tech are available for any business to read and learn from in The Open Playbook for Best Practice.

The Open Playbook for Best Practice is an open source document with tips and insights from businesses and recruiters sharing what has worked well in their diversity journey. It covers four key topics: Returners & Retraining; Retention & Growth; Recruitment and Culture and contains a section on other resources that are available for members to use. This resource will continue to grow as we hold more regional events throughout 2019 and insert our members’ learnings.

The Tech Talent Charter has also compiled a searchable and sortable Diversity Directory containing over 300 programmes that employers can draw on to support them in driving inclusion and diversity in their companies.

Gill Wylie, Enterprise Transformation Director, Lloyds Banking Group, commented,

Being able to attract, develop, fully utilise and retain top female talent is highly important to us, and we have set a target for 40% of our senior roles to be held by women by 2020. We are proud to work with the Tech Talent Charter to promote roles of women in technology, throughout the length and breadth of the UK. This is just one of the ways we are helping Britain prosper.

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Getting to Equal – How Digital is Helping to Close the Gender Gap at Work

24 March, 2016 By WiC

It’s a well-documented fact that women are lagging men in workplace equality. Different reports have pegged the time to gender parity at as much as 100 years. Now new Accenture research is proving that digital fluency—the extent to which both men and women have embraced digital technologies to become more knowledgeable, connected and effective—is helping to close this gender gap and level the playing field for women in the workplace.

Accenture’s Digital Fluency Model examines the impact of digital technologies across women’s entire career lifecycle. Nearly 5,000 women and men in 31 countries were surveyed to gauge their familiarity with digital technologies. While men outscore women in digital fluency across almost all of the 31 countries studied, that gap is narrowing and digital fluency acts as an accelerant in every stage of a person’s career—a powerful one in education and in the workplace, and an increasingly important one as they advance into the ranks of leadership.

Why is this? Digital fluency is helping today’s workers better manage their time and become more productive. Digital fluency also enables greater work flexibility—an amenity that workers value and companies are now providing. While men and women alike are liberated by the balance that work flexibility affords, women appear to derive greater value from it.

Getting on the right side of the digital fluency gap can change the picture for women—and their countries—in dramatic ways.

If governments and businesses can double the pace at which women become digitally fluent, we could reach gender equality in the workplace by 2040 in developed nations and by 2060 in developing nations.

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Digital has a positive impact on the women’s education and employment opportunities.

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Tough Choices – unlocking STEM

10 February, 2016 By WiC

Tough Choices, a new report by Your Life campaign in partnership with AT Kearney and supported by the CBI, found that young people are deterred from studying maths and physics A-levels, which are seen as too theoretical, inaccessible, and only for the “ultra-bright”. Yet they unlock a vast array of exciting jobs, which are fundamental to the businesses we operate and the UK’s global competitiveness.

The report reveals engagement with maths and science declines by 74% among girls and 56% among boys during secondary school.

Tough Choices, blames the lack of knowledge among teachers and parents about job prospects for maths and science subjects. ‘Students are not just uninformed, they are ill-informed about the value of STEM for their future careers and livelihoods and about the value of STEM in the labour market in general.’

It also criticises schools that recommend STEM subjects only to ‘ultra-bright’ students. ‘Many teachers and parents push students to prioritise good grades and as a result steer them away from STEM.’

Combined v separate sciences

The report adds that the current approach to combined and separate science choices at GCSE has a big impact on whether students continue with the subject at A-level. Students who take combined sciences, often a choice made for them by the school, are two to three times less likely to take the subject further.

‘Streaming has two effects. It sends the message to many [combined] science students that “science is not for you”. It also means that, if they do choose to proceed with an A-level, they are starting at a disadvantage, as they have covered less of the curriculum than their [separate] science peers.’

Recommendations

The report makes a series of recommendations. It asks employers to emphasise STEM in their recruitment and influence careers advice. It calls on government to improve the quality and quantity of STEM teaching, ensuring teaching methods are relevant and engaging with an emphasis on practical applications. It also asks teachers and parents to change the message students receive from ‘it’s hard’ to ‘you can do it’.

Economic effects

Tough Choices was written by consultants A.T. Kearney for the Your Life campaign in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The CBI warns that without significant change, the current STEM worker shortfall of 40,000 each year will continue, causing the UK economy to fall further behind other countries.

Paul Drechsler, CBI president, said:

Education is a shared passion for government, business, schools and parents – who all want the best for young people. As the business community we have a role to play – offering support to teachers and headteachers, inspiring young people and giving up-to-date insights into the world of work.

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Tough Choices. Read how schools put off #girls and #boys studying #STEM

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