Guest blog: Fresh momentum in industry push for gender diversity

I love June. It’s full of promise at the start of summer with much going on and much to celebrate. June 23^rd is International Women in Engineering Day and this year’s theme is ‘Together We Engineer’. Do share your inspiring stories and case studies to help draw girls and young women into the engineering and technology workforce using the hashtag #INWED25.

After some concerns about women’s representation in engineering and technology with a dip in participation reported last year, it’s great to see a bounce back in the numbers with women now taking up 16.9% of roles. This is obviously no way near parity but is at least moving in the right direction again and there is real momentum across the sector to make a difference. We’ve been working with 40 different organisations since last autumn as part of the Gender Pathways Project, coming together around six areas of collective action that we believe have the potential to significantly increase the number of young women on pathways into engineering and technology at 18. These include taking a different approach to developing curriculum, assessment and teaching materials, promoting an already evidenced whole school approach to gender equity and developing the evidence base for interventions in this area.

Whilst we need to understand more about which particular elements of careers activities are impactful; we do know that they add up to make a difference to students’ interests. Research published by the Careers & Enterprise Company last year showed that increasing the amount of careers activities students engage in, increases their ‘career ready’ the likelihood that they aspire to work areas of labour market need and buck gender stereotypes. Unfortunately, girls typically score lower on ‘careers readiness’ scores at every age, but those that score the highest are twice as likely to want to be engineers.

And things are getting better. Data published by UCAS earlier this year showed almost 217,000 applications submitted for engineering and technology courses by the January deadline, a 14 per cent increase from 189,560 last year. This is fantastic. Although we do have to hope that the education system has the capacity to meet this growing interest. With many universities facing financial pressure and spaces at a premium, it is important that employers work with schools and local careers networks to also offer other training pathways including apprenticeships.

And what better way to open young people’s minds to careers in engineering and technology than my personal highlight of the year, the Big Bang Fair. Our flagship event welcomes over 20,000 young people to the NEC in Birmingham between 17 to 19 June and is a wonderful opportunity for industry professionals to meet with young people and inspire and encourage them. We also celebrate the success of the Big Bang Competition finalists and winners at the Fair. This year’s entries have ranged from a sustainable F1 helmet, an automated pill dispenser, an eco-friendly water filter and a range of ingenious AI projects from health and wellbeing Apps to using AI to help our environment. I am certain all of the finalists have incredible futures ahead of them and look forward to celebrating with them.

If you are already participating in STEM outreach or are thinking about doing so - many thanks, we need as activity as we can get. We’ve just published a guide that might be helpful - Advancing STEM careers provision in schools. Developed in collaboration with our Careers Working Group, it draws on careers inspiration experts from a UK secondary school, STEM Learning, UCL Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Physics, BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology and offers the latest digest of research about what works to increase young people’s awareness and bring to life the dynamic world of STEM. It’s well worth a read with great tips for visiting schools, career fairs and work experience placements - these all add up to make a huge difference to igniting that passion for STEM.