Revamping the effort to shift the dial on girls and STEM

A data-driven approach can encourage girls to take up science, technology, engineering and maths.

Women in STEM ambassador, astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith

Moving the dial on women’s adoption of careers in the hard sciences is proving a tough problem, but it is not intractable, says the federal government’s Women in STEM ambassador, astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith.

Millions of dollars have been devoted to drawing more girls into the pipeline of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and keeping them there, so far an apparently fruitless task, as the most recent figures from the 2016 census show.

“Until a couple of years ago I think we were doing very poorly,” Harvey-Smith says of Australia’s efforts. “The numbers speak for themselves: 17 per cent of STEM-qualified workers in Australia are women.

“And it’s actually a lot worse in a lot of subjects, for example, in information technology and engineering and in the vocational education and training sector. People in trades and others with VET qualifications make up almost two-thirds of Australia’s STEM workforce — about 61 per cent — and only eight per cent are women. So we’re doing appallingly as a nation, as are many other similar industrialised nations in this area.”

Harvey-Smith’s appointment as Women in Stem ambassador in October 2018 was part of a sea change in the federal government’s approach, a new determination to come up with a plan that might make a significant difference by 2030.

In April 2019, a Women in STEM Decadal Plan created by the Australian Academy of Science in collaboration with the Australian Academy of Science and Technology was launched, and so was the federal government’s Advancing Women in STEM strategy.

The third element of the offensive, released a year ago, is the action plan for early priorities from the other two documents, such as an anonymised trial of the assessment of research proposals; a STEM Equity Monitor to measure engagement and participation of girls and women in STEM education and employment; and national evaluation guidelines for STEM programs.

These reflect Harvey-Smith’s data-driven approach to this part of her role, which also encompasses relationships with government, business and education. For example, while many programs aimed at high schoolers benefit individuals, as yet they have not made a wholesale difference, Harvey-Smith says.

“When we did an audit two years ago of these programs, there were 330 of them across the country,” she says. “And tracking the data over the last 10 years through the national and other data sources, we’ve seen that, in fact, there was almost no statistically significant shift in the number of girls actually working in or taking higher education in STEM subjects.”

Grattan Institute senior associate Will Mackey, who is among those who have crunched decades of these numbers, confirms the importance of hitting the right part of the pipeline.

“You can do a little bit at the transition from high school to university,” Mackey says. “(But) you can’t just say to a Year 12 student: ‘Hey, come and be an engineer’ if they’re a girl, or ‘Be a teacher’ if they’re a boy. You have to start earlier.”

Harvey-Smith says: “So the fact is it has really made no difference and the sinking feeling came in then. Everyone was thinking, well, what can we do that will actually work?”

The national evaluation guide that will be used for government initiatives is aimed at establishing that.

“We’re creating a place where people can share their evaluations to show what works and what doesn’t work transparently, and then we will put money into things that do work and shift that dial on a national level,” Harvey-Smith says.

The private sector also is being encouraged to use the national evaluation guide for its STEM programs and Harvey-Smith’s hope is that there will be international interest as well to “share those results and understand what works. We’re really adding to a body of evidence around these interventions.”

‘Mothers are three times more likely to talk to their two-year-old boys about numbers and counting than they are to their girls at preschool’

— Astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith

Questions lying behind the lack of STEM take-up among girls and women remain. Australian National University higher education policy expert Andrew Norton attributes it partly to a simple lack of interest. He cites 2018 research that showed a lower take-up of STEM by women in more gender-equal societies compared with those where there was less gender equality.

“Life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects,” the UK-led study concluded, which Norton paraphrases as “STEM is often one of the few pathways out of that situation”.

STEM champions respond that the cultural norm in countries such as Australia steers girls away from STEM and boys towards it, beginning in infancy, so how is it possible to know what their preferences would have been had they been allowed to develop neutrally?

“Mothers are three times more likely to talk to their two-year-old boys about numbers and counting than they are to their girls at preschool,” Harvey-Smith says.

Apart from preference, there is debate over the financial and career advantages to be gained.

The STEM Workforce report released last year by then chief scientist Alan Finkel has a mix of figures based on the 2016 census.

Overall, a greater proportion of people with university STEM qualifications earned $104,000 or above than those without, but women benefited from that significantly less than men. About 26 per cent of women who had a university degree, were STEM qualified and working full time earned $104,000 or above, compared with 45 per cent of men; for the VET-trained, it was 9 per cent of women compared with 20 per cent of men.

A 2018 paper from the Australian Journal of Labour Economics by Mike Dockery and Sherry Bawa, using 2016 data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, summarises: “Women who gain STEM qualifications have lower labour market participation rates, higher unemployment rates, are relatively dissatisfied with their employment opportunities and with the extent to which their skills are used in their jobs compared to women with other tertiary qualifications.

“They also face a larger wage gap relative to men with equivalent qualifications … policies to promote female participation in STEM need to be accompanied by measures to address career barriers they face in the labour market.”

Norton’s perspective “tends to be less how should society or the economy look as what is actually in the individual interests of the students. And what I’m not seeing is the case that there are women not doing STEM now who would be better off if they did a STEM degree”.

However, Norton can also see the dial shifting based on his latest analysis of enrolment data.

“In all the STEM fields, the numbers are trending up, but obviously for IT and engineering, women are still a very low percentage of the total — about 17 per cent in each of those for 2019. And for IT and science, the total is still below what it was 20 years ago, even though the absolute numbers are much higher in science than they were before.

“It’s always hard to know exactly what is driving enrolment, possibly the prominence that’s given to STEM generally — they are the most-promoted fields of education. So at the margins that possibly makes some difference.”

In an address to the National Press Club in November 2019, Harvey-Smith said: “It’s really on all of us to question what we’re doing and to make sure that we’re giving all of our children the greatest opportunity.”

Now she is clearly hopeful: “The horizon is looking a lot brighter and we’re definitely seeing this national co-ordination through the government and the industry sector and education, working together towards common goals.”