In 2023, the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee published a landmark report on diversity and inclusion across STEM and the disparity in funding, social acceptance and educational supports between genders. The publication also touched on impacts based on other social categorisations, including race and sexuality and delivered insights on how “opportunities to gain the skills required by STEM employers are not equally distributed across society”. Common themes outlined both within this report, and by the leading industry figures interviewed by Robotics & Automation Magazine, reveal the critical areas in need of intervention to address the UK’s STEM gap.
Early-age intervention
In its report, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee outlines how children’s “experiences in the classroom shape their life choices and outcomes”. One if its major recommendations is ensuring children are exposed to curriculums, role models and career advice from early on to enable all children “to see themselves in what they learn from an early age”. Professor Mini Rai, global chair in robotic engineering at the University of Lincoln, also points to the critical nature of early interventions for girls through education, commenting that “statistics show that a lot more needs to be done by governments, employers and education providers to address the current gaps in employment and STEM education”.
The appetite for better promoting women role models is clear, with all those interviewed for this feature mentioning this as a key priority. Niamh Donnelly, co-founder of cleaning robotics company Akara Robotics, comments that “promoting the excellent work being done by women in our industry” is critical to “create role models that will inspire future generations and help promote greater diversity”. She emphasises the importance of this in a traditionally male-dominated profession, and fellow tech co-founder, Oana Jinga from warehouse automation firm Dexory, concurs. Jinga explains, “encouraging diversity in STEM is a cause particularly close to my heart. Role models are crucial – young women need to see senior figures they can aspire to, and women in those leadership positions need to be visible to create that pathway”.
This visibility forms a critical part of the structural changes needed within educational institutions to address the gender gap present in interest and pursuit of STEM subjects, especially in more niche areas such as robotics. Rosa Wells – FE Principal and Dean of STEM, University of Birmingham, expresses: “I believe that the principal barriers are attraction and retention. Robotics has the potential to change perceptions of STEM careers. Young people find them interesting and often feedback that they didn’t know engineering involved robotics. The challenge is that schools need to be supported to share the opportunities with these ‘new’ careers.”
By reducing the centralisation of male research and discoveries, this helps students from a broader range of demographics see role models in STEM fields that align with themselves. This promotes better senses of belonging in STEM and provides positive reinforcement to encourage better subject engagement and sustained academic interest. As McBride-Wright explains: “There’s this idea that fairness is about giving everyone the same when it is not. It is about recognising the starting point of where people are coming from and putting in the right measures in place to create equitable outcomes for all.”
Contributions to the House of Commons inquiry highlighted the importance of the curriculum in shaping students’ perceptions and GCSE and A-Level choices. Education charity and social enterprise Teach First shared its research with the committee, which highlighted that “not a single woman’s name explicitly features in the national curriculum for GCSE science”. What’s more, the group’s analysis of the GCSE double science specifications from three major exam boards, identified the explicit mention of just two female scientists, versus more than 40 male scientists whose names or attributed concepts and materials were mentioned. Early-stage interventions and role models can encourage a more diverse talent pool into STEM subjects, helping to increase the number of women in associated careers, and thus the number to achieve senior and decision-making roles.
Funding challenges
A disparity in both the availability of funding for female-led research and commercial start-ups offers a continuous challenge to addressing the gender gap in STEM — and has in fact become a cumulative problem.
Within the venture capital (VC) ecosystem, one of the major issues that women founders experience can be the receipt of funding itself – especially when it comes from other women. Named attribution bias, this issue can occur when female-led start-ups receive funding from female investors, with subsequent prospects then attributing this success to founders’ gender rather than their competence, deterring VC firms from awarding further financing. Donnelly comments on this, and that it is well-documented that female-led companies find it harder to raise investment. She explains that in robotics, which historically has been a sector that has been perceived as high risk by investors, this added barrier makes it especially hard for women to raise necessary funding.
Just 2% of VC invested in Europe and the United States in 2023 went to women-led startups, with less than 1% overall going to women of colour, despite the disproportionate success women have in terms of driving wealth. A breadth of research exists to demonstrate how women-led startups outperform their male counterparts, including how such companies generate 63% more value and twice as much per dollar invested (First Round, 10-Year Project). What’s more, data from The Rogue Women’s Fund showed that women-led start-ups are five times more likely to become billion-dollar than male-led companies.
If the figures around VC investment distribution weren’t worrying enough, a further barrier in this area and in terms of academic funding is “a lack of transparency and data around the current level of funding, gender balance and representation – data [which could] provide insights on what’s working well and where we need further investments and focus”, adds Elizabeth Ajayi, director – AI enabled business & cost transformation at Capgemini Invent.
Jinga shares her personal experiences working in this space: “As a woman who entered the tech world from a non-technical background, I’ve experienced the constant need to prove myself and like others have found myself having to prove my worth and fight for a seat at the table.” She explains that this was particularly acute in pitching environments, where her “voice was often drowned out by male counterparts”. To overcome this, Jinga states that, “it’s crucial for the industry to recognise and appreciate the contributions women bring and try to bring equal representation to events and funding opportunities”.
Gender inequity for funding persists in academia, too. While the gap in grants given to women versus men is frequently attributed to women applying for less and applying less often, this justification fails to look at the wider picture. On average, grants awarded to women are less than 40% of the sums received by their male colleagues (data provided after an FoI request to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council). According to UKRI’s Diversity data, between 2016 and 2017, £944m was awarded overall to clinical trials or research headed by men, compared with £69m to research led by women. What’s more, in UKRI’s 2020-21 diversity data for funding applicants update, the median award amount for male principal investigators (PIs) was approximately £400,000, compared with approximately £300,000 for female PIs. While one driver of this gap could be attributed to a lack of women in STEM, meaning lower application rates, other factors include fewer women in key decision-making roles.
Disparity in funding for academic research is also a cumulative issue, with further divisions between genders being driven by the fact that past funding achievements are used as a metric to determine future awards. Known as ‘The Matthew Effect’, this recurring issue of accumulated advantage means that, even for equally matched applications, those who secure funding are more likely to continue winning funding based on this initial success. In addition to this, women in STEM roles report larger workloads associated with teaching, administration and organisation (meaning less time dedicated to research proposals) than their male counterparts, thus creating further disadvantages when applying for funding.
This system of stacked bias is of key concern to Professor Samia Nefti-Meziani OBE, chair in robotics and AI and director of the Birmingham Robotics Institute. She adds “the principal barrier to equality in STEM, in terms of funding, employment and representation, is [based on] systemic bias and stereotypes and this is despite progress that has been made in the last few years”, all of which are further perpetuated by a system in which women are less likely to succeed at every stage. This problem only escalates, with research funding likewise playing a key role in the achievement of senior academic positions and successful research careers. Agnes Wamagui, knowledge transfer manager for robotics at InnovateUK Business Connect, adds that cumulative disadvantages associated with this mean women’s “limited access to professional networks can hinder access to funding opportunities”, with chances coming around that professionals aren’t even made aware of.
Workplace culture
For the women that do pursue careers in STEM research, be these in the commercial space of -through academia, challenges persist beyond the hiring process and funding opportunities. Donnelly explains that, even for the “women who take up careers in robotics, especially in technical roles”, professional difficulties are compounded by “the fact that they will be one of relatively few women on the team”. She explains that “being different from day one can be challenging and isolating but it can also have bigger problems, especially when it comes to promotions and progressions within the company when the decision-makers are mostly men”. Wells from the University of Birmingham builds on this, explaining that the challenges associated with being a minority means the sector may lose talented individuals. This, she says “means we need to support diverse individuals through, for example, mentoring and sponsoring” or networking opportunities to enable career progression.
The role that men must play in creating an inclusive culture in STEM settings cannot be overlooked, as Marck McBride-Wright, founder & managing director of EqualEngineers, explains. He points out that, “to create an inclusive culture, [especially in engineering] is about engaging the male majority into the ultimate benefits of it. I think a lot of men feel alienated, disenfranchised, they feel very threatened, like they’ve been told that they’re the cause of all these problems, because they’re privileged, or told X, Y, and Z, and so they feel backed into a corner.” He adds that “what we see with demographic-centred diversity programmes is that they’re having shallow impact…They’re not leading to the systemic change that’s ultimately needed to properly diversify [STEM] professions.”
Why innovation needs intersectionality
Intersectional diversity must not be ignored in the debate around increased gender diversity within STEM and robotics. This is because of the relevance of the interconnected nature of social groupings such as race, class and gender, which carry with them both independent and overlapping systems of discrimination or disadvantage. In particular, women who experience the additional biases that come from factors such as disability, race and ethnicity mean that many aspiring women in STEM are forced to deal with multiple impacts of an accumulatively biased system. As Wamagui articulates, “My mother has always taught me to always work harder than anyone else in the room. And this is because she would constantly remind me that the world is not designed for a woman – referencing that “it is a man’s world”. And the fact that, one, I’m Black, [and] two, I’m a woman, should be my motivation to work harder.” Workplace cultures and employers must therefore understand the benefits of not just promoting diversity, but intersectional diversity, to address the gap in employee retention between men and women, with longer-term strategies on how to do this being essential. As Rai adds, “lack of confidence, challenging socio-economic backgrounds, cultural stigma and gender discrimination” all impose barriers, and sometimes multiple at once.
As Ajayi explains, her desire as an automation leader is “to see more young girls, including those from BAME backgrounds, venturing into technology and understanding the role they have to play in creating a future where humans and machines can work hand in hand together”. Nefti-Meziani seconds this, pushing for changes such as the industry working to provide more scholarships and internships specifically for women and minorities, as well as the advocation for more women in high-level STEM roles to inspire future generations. What’s more, Ajayi adds, the establishment of diverse teams across research and development offers a unique potential to analyse issues from different perspectives and create advancements that are “representative of the diverse groups they serve”. Lack of diversity in these critical roles therefore limits research and the ability to do this on any sort of commercial scale, while also creating the risk of unintended bias in products and algorithms. Wamagui expresses the problem with this, as within “STEM we can also see [human imperfections slipping] through as biases in hiring processes, career advancement [as] stereotypes of certain groups affect the perception of competency”.
The UK-based Careers Research and Advisory Centre (CRAC), as part of its contribution to the House of Commons report, described the picture in relation to ethnic background as “much more nuanced” in terms of STEM progression and interest, noting “[ significant variation in rates of progression and outcomes across ethnic minority groups, though Black staff and students have consistently poorer outcomes than white and Asian students. The proportion of Black students entering undergraduate and postgraduate education has increased over the past decade, as it has for other minority ethnic groups, but they are leaving STEM in greater numbers at all stages of the career pipeline.”
This exacerbates problems, as technology companies often “choose to work on are ones that are most familiar to us”, Donnelly explains. She adds: “Lack of diversity in these settings can lead to the voices of important stakeholders not being heard or factored into the creation of the product and as well as a lack of priority given to problems that are not directly experienced by the technical team. For example, despite women being the number one users of healthcare services, innovation in the area of women’s health has been very slow.”
This means that poor retention of women within STEM careers doesn’t just impact those left behind, but it creates and entrenches further barriers to innovation. This gradual attrition as women move through their careers hinders scientific breakthrough by meaning those with accumulative advantage are often the ones who succeed, rather than those that are most able or competent. In addition to this, research papers “with greater ethnic diversity among their authors have a higher scientific impact than those produced by more ethnically homogenous groups”, as pharma giant GSK explains. As Rai notes, “there is a wide range of talent, ability, skill sets, psychometric profiles and more across all genders. Being non-inclusive or insufficiently diverse limits the scope of innovative thinking and exploration, thereby slowing down innovation. We [therefore] need a diverse workforce and an inclusive work environment.” This means that “bridging the gender gap isn’t just a matter of fairness; it’s about unlocking the full potential of the tech industry. Inclusion isn’t a favour but a necessity for sustained growth and evolution”, Jinga concludes.
This article was first published in the May 2024 issue of Robotics & Automation Magazine. Read it online now.