Science and technology are fundamental factors in the growth and development of every society. Strong STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education is vital to students’ success in an increasingly technological and global economy. It is a critical building block for exploration, innovation, and the economy, and the catalyst to attack problems affecting the world… and it is a catalyst for jobs. The under-representation of women in STEM fields is a potentially massive loss economically.

1. Women in Technology
Bridging the Gender Gap

3. Why do women represent only 14% of the US engineering
workforce?

4. Why do women represent only 9% of the engineering workforce in
the UK?

5. In Israel only 8% of the hardware engineers are women,
in a country where 49% of the overall workforce is female.

6. And women’s advancement continues to shrink.
In India women hold only 7.7% of board seats and just
2.7% of board chairs.

7. Whydo women turn away from technology careers?

8. What are the spoken and unspoken barriers that make it
difficult for women to advance in STEM fields?

9. Distinguished Professor &
Department Chair
Educational Psychology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Nadya Fouad surveyed
5,300 women who earned
engineering degrees within
the past six decades in order to figure
out why so few stayed in engineering.
Fouad reported that only 62% of
respondents were currently working
in engineering.

10. 17% of women left engineering because of caregiving reasons.

11. About 11% said they left because of working conditions, too much travel,
lack of advancement, or low salary.
“There is little to NO RESPECT for women in male-dominated fields.”

12. Approximately one-in-five women in engineering left because they
did not like the workplace climate, their boss, or the culture.

13. "It's the climate, stupid!”
Respondents in her study reflected this sentiment, with many calling
the engineering workplace unfriendly and
even hostile to women.

14. Lack of confidence was not a factor – Fouad’s study
found no difference in confidence levels
between those who left or stayed in the field.

15. Science, Engineering, and Technology (SET) industries

16. It is not women who need to change – it is the work
environment that must change.

17. Digital fluency is the key to
closing the gender gap.

18. Source: Getting to Equal: How Digital is Helping Close the Gender Gap at Work, Accenture 2016
*Colors modified from the original.

19. An analysis of users’ submissions of
new code to other developers’
projects revealed that code written by
women was accepted 78.6%
of the time and code written by
men was accepted 74.6% of the
time.
But when female coders indicated
their gender, their code was less likely
to be accepted: their acceptance rate
plummeting to 62.5%.
The findings suggest that women
coders face a persistent gender bias.

20. Will changing the pipeline equalize our
opportunities?

22. Bias, not pipeline issues or personal choices, pushes women
out of science – and that bias plays out differently depending on a woman’s
race or ethnicity.

24. Where do we start ?

25. Change is
Seeing people like me

26. Girls can be put off science careers by the prospect of being part of a
minority in a male-dominated sphere.

27. Mind the Gap was established by a group of female engineers from
Google Israel in collaboration with the Israeli National Center of Computer
Science Teachers.
Groups of female high school students are brought into the Google office each
month and told about computer science and its applications; they also meet
female engineers in an informal environment and experience their working
environment.
After these visits, 40% of the girls chooseto study
computer science.

28. Tomorrow’s Engineers shines a spotlight on
engineering careers in a way that young people,
and particularly girls, may have never considered
before.

29. a world of powerful examples

30. The Most Powerful Women In
Tech 2015

31. butsomething is still wrong

32. "Unless we break the
psychological
barrier we will have
enormous problems for
years to come," Cable,
the business secretary,
told the Guardian. "Half
of all state schools
don't have a single
girl doing physics.
We are only tapping
half the population."

33. What does the gap
cost society?

35. Interveningat the ‘Fight-or-Flight’ Moment
Research show that on the lower rungs of
corporate career ladders, fully 41% of
highly qualified scientists, engineers, and
technologists are women.
But the dropout rates are huge: Over time
52% of these talented women quit
their jobs.
Most strikingly, this female exodus is not a
steady trickle. Rather, there seems to be a
key moment in women’s lives—in their
mid-to-late thirties—when most head for the
door.

36. The changeshave to be on the social level by increasing the
awarenessof the attrition of women STEM.

37. We have to help women to
identify their passion in life.

38. Making a difference matters to women

40. Women are drawn to engineering projects that attempt to
achieve societal good.

41. At the interdisciplinary D-Lab at M.I.T., the focus is on developing “technologies that
improve the lives of people living in poverty.”
74% of over 230 enrolled students this past year were women.
This makes the D-Lab
one of the few
engineering initiatives
in the country that
has a several-fold
higher enrollment of
women than men.

42. Amy Smith, eco-designer
a mechanical engineer who designs for developing communities
"When you're designing a consumer product for
people with less than a dollar a day to spend,
affordability becomes extremely important."
The Phase Change Incubator is
designed to test for microorganisms in
water supplies without the need for
electricity, or expensive equipment or a
lab, making it perfect to use in remote
areas and/or poor communities.
D-Lab’s Designs Against Poverty

43. We envision a future where the people who
imagine and build technology mirror
the people and societies they build it for.

44. Rebecca Ralston
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