A stake in the future: Getting girls into science
7 March 2023 · 8 min
Over a third of university graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects are women, and UNICEF’s 2020 data shows that women form 40 percent of the global STEM workforce. Women outnumber men in healthcare positions. On International Women’s Day 2023, we ask: Are women on the way to equal representation in roles traditionally considered male? And why should it matter?
Only 28 percent of doctors across Africa are female, while women constitute 65 percent of the lower-status, lower-paid nursing roles.
What are the concerns?
First, all STEM jobs are not equal. Women are underrepresented in higher-paid engineering, technology and digital jobs. This holds true within a profession too: Only 28 percent of doctors across Africa are female, while women constitute 65 percent of the lower-status, lower-paid nursing roles.
Second, within each profession, men disproportionately hold the senior positions. Worldwide, women represented 33 percent of science researchers in 2018, but only 12 percent of members of national science academies, which lead decision making – and an even lower number in fields driving the digital revolution. The distinction begins early: There are more female than male undergraduates for subjects such as health and natural sciences, but this is reversed at PhD level.
women account for 12% of leadership roles.
Third, there are also great disparities between the countries where we work. Women make up nearly half of the information technology workforce in India, compared to a fifth in Mozambique.
Fourth, the digital revolution is widening the gap. From programming to artificial intelligence, computing holds great potential for innovation, wealth creation and outcomes that could be designed to benefit users equally. But the field is replicating many old workforce gender biases, widening the gap between those with the tools to function in this new world and those who are excluded, and threatening to automate the low-paid jobs of which 70 percent are held by women. And digital disparities between girls and boys start as early as primary school. If, as the UN predicts, over 60 percent of children entering primary school could grow up to work in jobs that do not yet exist, it is their teachers who have the power to shape their future.
Teachers recall the challenges they faced
Waseema Khawaja, Headteacher of the Aga Khan Academy, Nairobi – Nursery School, says: “I wasn’t directly told that STEM degrees are mostly for men. But when you reach a certain age, you realise that even though you weren’t directly told no, you have it present within your mind. The actions of those around me, the subtle exclusions in my education, the constant reminder of what a woman is, tends to wire your brain into thinking there is a set, womanly path for you.”
When it comes to further study, young women often face additional hurdles.
“As a child I dreamt of pursuing my higher education in renowned universities which are well equipped with labs, but such universities were not there in my small town,” says Ira Shrivastav, the lead science teacher for the Middle Years Programme at the Aga Khan Academy Dhaka. “And I was not allowed to move out of my city for higher studies or even leave my family for my education. Now in interviews, they look at me and ask where is this university? Nobody has heard the name of it and that makes a huge difference in the interview process.”
Sujana Veeramachaneni, former head of the science department at the Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad, recalls how university brought up new obstacles. “Social norms and mindset were a barrier. Though our labs were open for everyone, because of the rules and regulations for girls, like where we had to report to the hostel dorm before dinner, we had to depend on our male colleagues for taking the readings in the labs.”
Female STEM graduates do not always use their degrees, perhaps due to parental expectations or caring obligations. A 2019 study by the Aga Khan University Hospital Karachi found that 72 percent of female surgeons they interviewed experienced cultural barriers towards a surgical career, as compared to 25 percent of the males. Others enter the workforce but face further obstacles. UNICEF found that 50 percent of women in STEM globally say that they have faced discrimination.
Students working in the IT lab at the Aga Khan School, Dhaka.
“At that time there, parents were more focused on their children settling down in government jobs,” explains Ira. “Now they have realised that the children should study outside to also develop the skills for private jobs. And they have only one or two children, so they invest all their savings in their education and they are open to sending them out.”
Instead, she finds that children need encouragement to enter the arts. “The daughters have to be doctors and the sons have to be engineers or establish their own business in Dhaka.”
Fotima Safar-Ali, a chemistry teacher at the Aga Khan Lycée, Khorog, says: “Both boys and girls study science with great interest, because they know that with this knowledge they can live in comfortable conditions.”
An undergraduate science class at the University of Central Asia.
Arzoo Parbatani, a science teacher at the Aga Khan Academy Maputo, finds that “Most boys now want to choose business over sciences whereas girls are moving towards sciences. But something that bothers me is that these sciences are limited to health-allied areas; engineering is still a far dream for many girls that I teach.”
Waseema Khawaja, Headteacher, Aga Khan Academy, Nairobi – Nursery School
How are our institutions pushing to make STEM inclusive?
Whether encouraging preschool girls and boys alike to roleplay as doctors and firefighters, getting primary school students to build towers and windmills, or providing a platform for gender activists to share their knowledge, AKDN’s nurseries, schools and universities embed gender equality throughout their ethos.
Click on the stories below to find out more.
Students at the Aga Khan Lycée, Khorog take Makerspace classes, delivered by two Stanford University students.
The University of Central Asia’s School for the Advancement of Gender Equality (SAGE) provides training and a peer support platform for organisations, activists and others working in gender equality and advocacy. International experts share experiences and best practices from around the world, creating an active community for the future.
SAGE also allocates small grants to pilot innovative projects. One recipient was the Initiative of Roza Otunbayeva Public Foundation, which promotes STEM amongst girls and women in the Kyrgyz Republic. The Initiative is currently working with technical universities in Bishkek and Osh to assess the effectiveness of their communications with applicants. Dogdurgul Kendirbaeva, the Initiative’s Executive Director, notes that “In 2019, the number of women applying for technical sciences was only a third that of men. There is a low proportion of women in high-yield promising industrial sectors and girls are unprepared for the professions of the future. It is at school that educational stereotypes are formed, which reduce girls’ motivation for acquiring STEM skills. It is necessary to pay attention to the oppressive role of social and pedagogical gender stereotypes, dividing schoolchildren into future ‘breadwinners’ and ‘housekeepers’, with all the consequences for their further education.”
“When a woman is working in a career field that is so largely male dominated,” says Waseema, “it shows that the system can be rebuilt. For a young girl looking at a female CEO of a bank, it does not show her what women are assumed to not do, it shows her just how much they can. For a young boy, it is important for it to be normal for him to see a woman as an engineer. It is important for gender to be taken out of the equation when it comes to intelligence, capabilities and the ability to succeed, and the only way of doing that is having equal representation of gender to make the field as inclusive as possible.”
Children try out being doctors at the Aga Khan Academy, Nairobi – Nursery School.
AKDN / Georgina Goodwin
Arzoo agrees: “The needs of each gender can be better understood and catered for if there is equal representation and voice. Cultural conditioning must be reduced and only then there might be some hope of achieving equality. Invite girls into active discussion about big ideas, listen to their perspectives and include them in decision making.”
Thinking digitally
“Coding is seen as a man’s field,” says 21-year-old Ana Rita Dias, who participated in Bytes4Future, an initiative in Portugal that prepares marginalised youth for digital careers.
"But it’s a field that is still evolving... so women should be a part of it to ensure it becomes an area that addresses women’s issues too.”
UNICEF calculates that over 90 percent of jobs worldwide have a digital component, and AKDN aims to prepare children and youth accordingly, irrespective of their gender.
Click on the videos below to see apps designed by teenagers in Tajikistan, how students in India are learning to use social media safely and how youth in Portugal are getting hired as programmers thanks to digital bootcamp.
Students from the Aga Khan Lycée, Khorog, Tajikistan learn to develop mobile applications as part of their afterschool coding club, combining student empowerment, 21st-century skills and social responsibility.
Bytes4Future, created by the Aga Khan Foundation and partners, enables socioeconomically marginalised youth to develop their programming.
A computer lab session at the Diamond Jubilee High School for Girls, Mumbai. Students participated in the Hindustan Times’ Codeathon in 2020.
AKDN
Students at the Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad learn to blog and tweet safely.
Does it matter if STEM roles remain male dominated?
For the women involved, yes, the missed benefits would be clear: the higher salaries offered by high-tech, male-dominated occupations, the chance to push forward the boundaries of science and technology, and the reduced risk of losing a job to automation.
But gender equality runs deeper.
From seatbelts to software, scientific outputs are dependent on human inputs. Google’s speech recognition software, for example, is designed and tested mostly by men. It is 70 percent more likely to recognise male than female speech. If women remain uninvolved as researchers, and continue to be marginalised as end users, innovation does not benefit them. Car seat heights and spacesuits will remain tailored to men’s bodies. The symptoms of heart attacks in women will continue to be relatively unknown. Women’s involvement can be a matter of life or death.
Meanwhile, excluding half the population from fulfilling their economic and social potential harms all societies. The New York Times wrote that if women in India were represented in the formal workforce at the same rate as men, rather than at the current 20 percent, India's economy could expand by an additional 60 percent by 2025. Whether by increasing national productivity, enabling inclusive decision making, or improving the prospects of the next generation, equal representation of women is integral to AKDN’s development work.