![]() Regarding youth employment and STEM, EU policy appears to focus on getting women and girls into the digital sector specifically. Under the Commission’s Next Generation EU plan, €806.9 billion will be allocated as a temporary recovery instrument to combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (European Commission 2022d). This may be explained by a gender pay gap and the lack of women in senior positions in the digital sector (European Commission 2019), which could discourage younger women from pursuing a career in STEM.įor the 2019-2024 European Commission, youth employment is a funding priority, with €22 billion budgeted for this purpose (European Commission 2022c). There is a “gender-equality paradox,” whereby women are less likely to obtain STEM degrees in wealthier and more gender equal societies, such as in Finland and Sweden (Sosammon 2018).Įxperts have highlighted the ‘leaky pipeline’ phenomenon, whereby the majority of Master’s students in science are women, but they tend to leave the sector at higher rates than their male counterparts (Thornton 2019). ![]() Girls are just as likely as boys to work within the scientific sphere, but they account for just one in three STEM graduates (European Commission 2022a). Other factors may also be educational inequality, outdated teaching methods and curricula, and a lack of female STEM teachers in school (EQUALS Global Partnership, ITU and UN Women 202, UNICEF 20201) Starting in childhood, girls and boys are socialised differently, deterring them from pursuing ‘difficult’ science and mathematics subjects (UNICEF 2020). Hence, facilitating female participation in STEM from a young age trains girls, and helps to shape the world around them by working in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence and big data (European Commission 2019). Excluding half of the world’s population from access to scientific innovation and digital skills, and from opportunities to shape these spheres for future generations, will prove profoundly damaging (UNICEF 2020). Moreover, the STEM sector gives girls the opportunity to learn transferable skills that are both applicable to the rapidly evolving job market and to their day to day lives (UNICEF 2020).Ī UNICEF report argues that, as technology and economies adapt to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, women and girls must do the same. ![]() Hence, increased women’s participation in STEM offers substantial economic benefits that could not only help the EU work towards gender parity but also combat the organisation’s economic woes, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. By facilitating the entry of more women and girls into the STEM sector, the EU could increase its GDP per capita to 3% in 2050, improving the bloc’s GDP by up to 820 billion euros (European Institute for Gender Equality, 2022b), and generating 16 billion euros annually (Girls Go Circular 2022). The European Commission predicts that Europe needs a further one million digital experts (European Commission 2019). However, how do these theories explain the glaring gender gap in Germany and Finland, where the former Chancellor had herself been a scientist (Thornton 2019)? ![]() Moreover, the Forum argues that the gender gap in STEM is narrower in the Nordic countries, due to their comprehensive welfare policies that combat gender inequality more generally (Thornton 2019). ![]() The Soviet Union and its satellite states in eastern Europe had “government-funded facilities” that facilitated women’s work in STEM. In 2018, just 41% of the EU’s scientists and engineers were women (Eurostat 2020), and just 5 EU Member States had more women scientists than men: Lithuania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Portugal, and Denmark (Thornton 2019).Īccording to The World Economic Forum, former political alliances may explain this gender gap. Globally, women obtain 53% of STEM university degrees (Sirimanne 2019), but in the EU only 34% of graduates in the field are women (Girls Go Circular 2022). ‘STEM’ stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. It will discuss the barriers to such participation, current EU policies and provide further recommendations for closing the gender gap. This paper gives an overview of women’s participation within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and, Maths) in the European Union. Women in STEM in the European Union – facts and figures ![]()
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