Some progress for women in STEM but more effort needed

The 2022 edition of the Australian Government’s STEM Equity Monitor shows that women as a proportion of all people working in STEM-qualified jobs grew by two percentage points to 15% in 2021, while the number of women enrolling in university STEM courses increased by 24% between 2015 and 2020. However, just 23% of senior management and 8% of CEOs in STEM-qualified industries are women and, on average, women still earn 18% less than men across all STEM industries.

Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic said there is clearly still much work to do to achieve equal opportunity for women to learn, work and engage in STEM, as well as create more pathways for First Nations people, migrants, mature workers and those living with disability.

“That is why the government has announced a review to determine how programs can be reformed to support greater diversity,” he said. This review is examining the delivery and impact of existing programs under the government’s Women in STEM program suite, as well as cultural and structural barriers that limit participation and retention of women and other under-represented groups in STEM.

“The data in the STEM Equity Monitor adds vital information in telling the story of where we are now,” Husic said. “They underline the importance of why a renewed effort is needed to break down structural barriers to meet the growing demand for workers in the tech and science sectors.”

Science & Technology Australia CEO Misha Schubert said the latest data highlights the twin tasks of further widening the pipeline of women into STEM and supporting women to thrive and progress into leadership roles in the STEM workforce.

“After a decade of concerted effort to encourage more girls and young women to study STEM, we’re starting to see real progress now with many more women doing STEM degrees,” Schubert said.

“The next urgent challenge is for deeper efforts to tackle the gender pay gap for women in STEM and to propel many more women into senior management and leadership roles in the STEM workforce. STEM employers have a powerful responsibility here.”

Professor Chennupati Jagadish, President of the Australian Academy of Science, added that the modest increase in women’s workforce participation and enrolments in university STEM courses is countered by the fact that “girls’ confidence in all STEM subjects falls as they get older and that girls are more likely than boys to list lack of interest as a barrier to studying STEM”.

“We must do more to create a more accountable STEM ecosystem that enables the attraction, retention and progression of diverse communities in STEM,” Jagadish said.

“To break down persistent barriers faced by underrepresented communities, the STEM ecosystem — government, academia, educators and industry — needs to push in the same direction and harness the opportunities in the [Academy-developed] Women in STEM Decadal Plan so as to reach gender equity by 2030.”

In related news, new research has found having a male-sounding first name on an application increases the odds of being granted a patent at IP Australia. Dr Vicki Huang, a senior lecturer in intellectual property (IP) law at Deakin Law School, said the gender bias uncovered by her team was concerning given extensive investment encouraging women into STEM education and careers.

“While we see more women than men enrolling as undergraduate STEM students, they do not seem to be crossing the bridge into postgraduate STEM roles and inventorship,” Huang said.

The study — published in the UNSW Law Journal — analysed more than 300,000 patent applications to IP Australia over a 15-year period and reverse-engineered close to one million inventor names to assign them a probable gender. It found:

• 90% of applications had at least one male inventor.
• 24% of applications had at least one female inventor (typically via a mixed gender team).
• An inventor with a female-sounding first name had slightly lower odds of getting their patent application approved than a male-named inventor.
• As the number of male names on a team grew, the odds of a successful application increased.
• These patterns were observed irrespective of scientific field, year of application or type of filing.
   

The results are consistent with similar research in the USA, where applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office with a female-sounding name were found to be less successful than male-named applicants or those with an undetermined gender.

Huang said that securing patents was one important indicator of success for women in STEM, describing a patent as “one of the most valuable ways you can monetise a new and inventive scientific idea”.

“Inventors use patents to secure capital, so less women securing patents can mean less women succeeding in entrepreneurship. Academics and scientists also use patents to show expertise in their field and to progress in their career.

“Another issue is that many patents with female inventors tend to focus on female disease, so there could be a gender bias in the type of science being developed.

“If women aren’t succeeding at the patent office, we need to find out why and fix it.”

Huang said previous theories had focused firmly on the potential gender bias of patent examiners and officials, but she believes the issue is much bigger than that.

“We suspect there are larger, systematic and institutional biases that impact women who endeavour to become inventors. There may also be country and cultural differences at play given IP Australia receives so many international applications.

“For example, patent applications can be expensive, and women might have less access than men to the funding or mentoring needed to get through the prosecution phase with a patent examiner.

“The first step to fixing the problem is recognising that a problem exists, which is what we have done in this study. We hope it starts a conversation that causes people to reflect on their own biases and stimulates change.”

Image credit: iStock.com/FG Trade

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