Next Gen News

Women continue to benefit women '\\' articles and careers in engineering and natural sciences and mathematics, despite all efforts to change this situation. Why?

Get the data

Women are disappearing from subjects already dominated by men, according to an exclusive new analysis of student numbers. Five years ago, women made up 24% of computer science students in higher education. Now they make up just 19%. In 10 years, there has been no improvement in the uptake of women in mathematical sciences â€" the proportion remains stable at 38% â€" or engineering and technology, where women still make up just 15% of student numbers.

Figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (see table, page 2) also suggest that women are falling back into more "feminine" subjects than their predecessors. The proportion of female students has risen by three percentage points in subjects related to education, where they now make up 76% of students, and the creative arts, where they make up 60%. The biggest gender split comes in "subjects allied to medicine" â€" which include qualifications in nursing and nutrition and exclude straight medical degrees â€" where women now make up 82% of students.

Engineering is the subject with the smallest proportion of women, with fewer than one in seven students female. Peter Hicks, a member of the education and skills panel of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, is concerned. "We need to be very worried that ... these figure are low and not getting any better. In my 40 years of teaching electrical engineering at Manchester University women never made up more than 5% of my classes. The UK desperately needs engineers â€" we can't afford to lose what is effectively half of its talent."

Gilly McIvor is one woman who might have made an ideal engineering degree candidate. At 26, she is the only female apprentice training to be an electrical engineer at the Diageo factory in Glasgow, which bottles whisky. While women work on the 10 large production lines in the factory, management, HR and administration, there had never been a woman on the mechanical or electrical engineering team. McIvor regrets the fact that it took her a long time to get there.

"My school aptitude test flagged up that I should do something practical, but everyone said I should do a more academic degree," she says. She opted not to go to university at all. "In the end I just worked in call centres and sales for a few years. I could have been here a lot earlier."

Now she's on the scheme, McIvor says she loves her job. "I don't think I've ever experienced sexism," she says. "I was a bit worried when I started that it would be 'all boys together' and they'd resent having a woman around, but the only thing that ever bothered me was when they kept opening doors for me â€"and that's kind of trivial! I think it's misconceptions that put women off, not what it's actually like."

Misconceptions and gender stereotypes have been around for a long time, but experts are still struggling to understand why gender representation seems to be stagnating â€" or in some cases deteriorating â€" across certain key subjects. Ceri Goddard, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, thinks it's partly because society abandoned the feminist movement too early. "We assumed that because women were moving into economic life all of our social and cultural stereotypes would just disappear," she says. "The truth is that we have only just started to challenge the notion that women are good at the caring professions while men are good at logic, science and industry. This divide is fuelling the gender pay gap."

The statistics, however, do show some good news for women. Although they are still in the minority, women have made progress in the physical sciences, where they now make up 41% of students, compared to 36% 10 years ago. Once, the vast majority of doctors were male; now women make up 58% of enrolments in medicine and dentistry courses. Other subjects dominated by women â€" such as languages and law â€" are hardly second-class disciplines either. Indeed, the biggest jump in female representation came in veterinary science, where female enrolments increased from 67% to 77% in 10 years.

In recent years, concern has been expressed that the proportion of women in some fields â€" teaching, for example â€" is too high. Some 85% of primary school teachers are now female.

In total, female students now make up 59% of the student body for all subjects including postgraduates â€" compared to 55% 10 years ago â€" and they tend to achieve better results than men.

But gender experts say there is still a long way to go. Professor Louise Morley, of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research at Sussex University, says: "If women exceed the 50% mark there is a fear that an industry is becoming 'feminised', but you have to look at the profession as a whole," she says. "More women are entering medicine, for example, but they are still massively underrepresented in the top ranks, and there are few female surgeons. Moreover, many of the fields women are entering aren't as highly paid as they used to be â€" medicine has become bureaucratised and men can make more money in technology, banking and finance."

Universities UK, the vice-chancellors' umbrella group, says that schemes to tackle gender imbalances are already in place, pointing to Athena SWAN, a project that it supports to recognise excellence in science, engineering and technology for women in higher education. "Encouraging more women to choose science subjects, and more men to study subjects related to medicine and education, is an area where universities are already working closely with schools to address any limiting traditional views about career paths," says Nicola Dandridge, its chief executive. "In comparison with the rest of Europe, the UK sits in the upper half of countries in terms of participation by females in science, maths and computing. This can largely be attributed to the work universities have done with schools to encourage participation in these subjects."

Around the country, individual institutions are taking steps to improve the gender balance. Manchester University's school of computer science is one example. Recognising that the dearth of female students came from a "problem in the pipeline", the school set up a computer animation competition for seven- to 19-year-olds. This year's competition, co-funded by Google and Electronic Arts, received entries from 211 schools and included a high number of contributions from girls. Funding has already been secured for next year.

Bernard Strutt, external affairs manager for the school, hopes that "the creative elements of the competition will prove especially appealing to women". But isn't this kind of attitude part of the problem, implying that women can't handle the more technical side of Stem subjects? "I should stress that the problem isn't confined to gender imbalance," says Strutt. "Over recent years there has been a significant downturn in applications across the board. Many students are likely to be put off by the restrictive ICT on the curriculum, but the creativity of computer science is much wider than that. We want students from both genders to become software engineers, not just software users."

But what about the school - they do quite the right thing? Jennifer Burden, director of the new National Center of stem indicates the excellent work in schools, and the center itself, which has just started a new eLibrary, designed to give teachers 'Treasure "from the curriculum and resources to stem subjects.

"Many schools have been doing some fantastic work in this area over the last five or 10 years," she says. "But it takes time for these changes to show. We'll be watching the uptake of A-levels in these subjects closely, but I hope we'll start to see more girls coming through." But this wait-and-see approach is not enough, according to Morley, who believes changing the figures requires deeper reform. "We need to look at the whole pedagogy of Stem subjects," she says. "Are there enough women scientists becoming teachers? Is the Stem curriculum addressing issues relevant to women's lives? Are girls being taught from an early age that these subjects are 'non-feminine'? These questions are important if we want to make the most of our talent."

A spokesman for the education department declined to comment specifically about girls' choices, but said: "All children need a good grounding in maths and science. One of the main reasons we are not proceeding with the previous government's planned primary curriculum is that it risked moving away from traditional subjects like these. We also want to go further in recruiting excellent science and maths teachers, encouraging even more maths and science graduates to come into teaching so that they can inspire the next generation. "

• Are schools doing enough to spark girls' interest in maths and engineering? Education.letters@guardian.co.uk

• This article was amended on 14 July 2010. The original referred to the Institute of Engineering Technology. This has been corrected.