Breaking the bias: root, branch and STEM

As the world reflects today on how we ‘break the bias’, I’m keen that we start with some of the sectors where this has traditionally been hardest. For Australia and New Zealand, one of the hardest areas to break the bias is the ‘STEM’ economy – science, technology, engineering and maths jobs and companies. I reflected on this in part last year on International Women’s Day, but this year I want to go deeper.

Jobs in STEM organisations are growing twice as fast as other sectors in Australia, but there are few women in STEM leadership roles. In fact, only 8% of STEM CEOs are women, versus 18% of CEOs in Australia. This lack of women in STEM leadership positions is one factor in the major deterrents for women taking up STEM roles. What’s more, we are missing out on talented women who could lead businesses – and the Australian and New Zealand economies – to success. ?

BCG recently partnered with Chief Executive Women to explore what actions could be taken to drive a greater representation of women in STEM. We have just published an in-depth analysis from an Australian perspective called Why don’t women get the cool jobs? What to do differently so talented women advance to leadership in STEM sectors, according to women who are leading the way.

The study makes a clear set of recommendations for how STEM organisations can better attract, support and retain women, including balanced interviewing for all talent pools and ensuring senior leaders don’t just mentor mid-level women, but sponsor them. These two recommendations in particular were strongly advocated by participants in the study, which centres on data and reflections gathered from 30 senior women in executive leadership and board roles at major STEM organisations. Other actions include making leaders accountable for gender-based promotion and retention, and measuring, evaluating and reporting on gender data to inform where interventions are needed.

As one senior executive in a major energy business said in the study, “I’m the last of the women in my starting cohort. All my female peers have dropped out of STEM and taken roles in other fields. I’ve been lucky to have a sponsor who pushed me into roles when there was resistance to a woman taking it on. But if there isn’t that leadership, then it just isn’t worth it for women to put their neck out for it.” That’s a reality that we need to change. Of course, it’s one thing to merely call for change and another entirely to take proactive steps.

Action from within

At BCG, we have a long track record of pursuing gender balance. But our approach must now step up in line with our growing and changing business. We’ve grown cadres with deep expertise to support the digital-, technology- and analytics-enabled transformation of organisations, so we need to apply the same pursuit of gender balance to our STEM roles. And we have more work to do. Getting the basics in place – like using inclusive language in hiring material, and ensuring pay equity – is essential, and I think at BCG we’ve got the basics right. But as the quote above demonstrates, there is a real need to push beyond the basics – that’s what we are now striving to do. For example, we recently used AI to look at our staff performance reviews to test whether the language people were using bottom-up was unintentionally steering them away from digital or quantitative roles in the firm. That analysis said that we were doing many things right, but some things needed improvement, which we are now addressing.

At BCG, we measure and evaluate gender data across our business, but we also do a cut of it across our digital and tech roles to get a picture of what we need to do and how far we need to step up in this space. While we’re seeing improvements on this front, we have a whole lot more to do.

Improvements have been driven by several initiatives, including targeted referrals for women in digital roles, tailored recruiting events for women to raise awareness and facilitate networking, and proactive outreach and sourcing of female candidates. We’ve seen the representation of women in our STEM roles, including in our digital and data science functions, rise: from about 25% to about 40% in BCG Digital Ventures in the last year, and I’m also pleased to say that we have significantly increased female representation in our GAMMA business, with women making up almost half of our new data scientist appointments since February 2021.

But recruiting is only one part of the story. We are also focused on retention and career development. Sponsorship of mid-career women, mentoring programs, and ensuring teams have multiple women on them: all are things our STEM women in particular have called out and which we have acted on, but will need to continue to build on.

Celebrating STEM women, and inspiring more

In a deeply analytical firm like BCG there are legions of ‘STEM’ women, whether by professional and educational background, or the work our teams do with clients, like Abbey Trewenack, Amrita Chang, Kate O’Keeffe and many others. Part of our opportunity is to tell those stories continuously, so a disproportionate share of the next generation of women feels inspired and confident to pursue their STEM interests.?

Some STEM women are newer to BCG locally, like Dr Liz Zhu, a former orthopaedic surgeon with a career in New Zealand and New York, who has re-joined BCG as a project leader in our new Auckland office, or Lauren Bailey who, following a career in engineering with Chevron in Perth and Houston, recently joined BCG as a project leader in Perth, where she’s also training for her second Rottnest solo crossing swim.

Others have been stalwarts of BCG for some time but are stepping into new leadership roles, like Monica Wegner, one of our partners deploying Gamma data science capabilities with clients, who now heads our Marketing, Sales and Pricing Practice. Similarly, Rebecca Russell, an engineer who postscripts some of her firm-wide emails with pure maths conundrums, now heads up our Climate & Sustainability Practice which works with businesses and governments as they transition to a net zero future. And Oxana Dankova, an economics PhD with deep experience in supporting utilities transform to meet the energy transition, heads up a new BCG centre of excellence in operations in the energy sector, harnessing the combination of data and analytics, smart energy technology and human change.

We are committed to achieving better gender balance across all our ‘STEM-heavy’ sectors including our digital and data businesses. Former astrophysicist, and now Sydney-based healthcare partner and author of the CEW-BCG report into ‘women in STEM’, Dr Sarah Thom, now leads our Women@BCG efforts. We will work alongside our new People Chair, Caroline Israel, and our technology and digital teams to measure, evaluate and report on gender data to ensure we’re on the right path. We’ll continue to create pathways for STEM women already in our business, and I am committed, alongside our other STEM leaders, to ensuring gender-balanced promotion and retention in BCG’s STEM roles.

Anthony Roediger is BCG’s Managing Partner in Australia and New Zealand