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Recruiters missing out on female STEM talent

February 2018

Women outperform men when it comes to degree classifications in STEM subjects, but how does this translate to employment outcomes?

Strong university performance

It is well known that science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects are heavily male dominated, despite more women attending university.

The gender breakdown for STEM degree courses was 70.9% male and 29.1% female in 2016, the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) data shows.1

A higher proportion of women were awarded a 2:1 or First. In fact, 80.5% of women achieved the highest degree classifications compared with 74.8% of men.

Degree,Female,Male
First class honours,32.9,31.99
Upper second class honours,47.6,42.84
Lower second class honours,16.63,20.9
Third class honours or pass,2.86,4.23

Fewer women in professional jobs

Male STEM graduates were much more likely to get a professional-level job six months after graduation, with 78.2% of them doing so against only 69.9% of female STEM graduates.

The largest disparity was among 25 to 29-year-old STEM graduates, where men were 11.3 percentage points more likely than women to be in professional-level employment after six months.

The level of professional employment for women in STEM is less than the average for all graduates across all subjects (71.3%). Only those aged 25 and over were more likely than the average graduate to be working in a professional-level job. But even then, they were less likely to be in professional-level employment than the average graduate in their age band.

For males, only 18 to 20-year-olds achieved less than the 71.3% average, although this was still above the average across all subjects for this age group.

Improving gender diversity in STEM

There are drastic shortages in some STEM employment areas, such as engineering, quantity surveying, IT, and finance, yet we still see relatively poor outcomes for female STEM graduates.2

A diverse workforce has been linked to improved business performance and innovation, and one study found that companies with women in leadership positions have better financial outcomes.3 Diversity has a direct impact on a business’s bottom line.

Being seen as an inclusive employer can improve public image, potentially making it easier to attract and retain workers in a competitive job market.

Despite this, when analysing employment outcomes by gender, we still see huge disparities between the percentages of graduates in professional-level roles.

There are ways to amend this. Recruiters could consider working more closely with universities with a diverse student body, setting mandatory recruitment targets for women, contextualised screening, and having an inclusiveness strategy. All of these methods could make a difference, although their suitability may depend on the employer.

Whatever employers choose to do, it is clear that for their own benefit, steps must be taken to improve gender diversity.

Notes

1 Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) 2015/16, HESA, 2017.

2 Agents' summary of business conditions, Bank of England (BoE), Q3 2017.

3 The Business of Gender Diversity, Gallup, 2014; Waiter, is that inclusion in my soup?, Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission and Deloitte Australia, 2012; The Tipping Point, MSCI ESG Research, 2016.

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