The stats that show too many talk it, without walking it.

This International Day of Women and Girls in Science, below are some stats that show what females working in STEM in academia, industry, and beyond are up against. Feel free to add your own stats. Because, as we women in innovation and enterprise know, there are a very many of them.

What the stats listed below, together with the copious others that could have been included speak to is a systemic issue that infiltrates numerous aspects of the working lives of women in and beyond STEM. It shouldn't be this way. It's shocking that in 2023 it is this way. But, it is what it is.

Will things be any better - any better at all - come the next IDWGS? On the balance of probability, probably no. Indeed, of late, some stats have been going in the wrong, not right direction.

Nearly 75% of professors are male [global], HESA 2022

The gender pay gap in academia in the top quartile is between 22.4% - 64.4% [UK] Political Studies Association 2019

The gender post-doctoral pay gap is bigger in academia than in any other industry [US] NSF 2021

The pay gap more generally in the UK averages 5.45%, the median is 9.71% UK Government 2022

Female directors of FTSE 100 companies earn 74% less than male directors, with an average disparity of ￡698,000 annually [UK] Mattinson Public Relations 2022

Male executives average 14% higher increases when job switching than women, Harvard Business School 2022

Women are 7.6% less likely to be given a bonus than men in commercial companies, Cendex 2022

Less than 29% of FTSE100 executive roles are filled by women, UK government, 2018

Women on academic editorial boards are as low as 14% for editors and as low as 8% for editors in chief, Nature, 2022

Women account for just 26% of all scientific authors. Alshebli et al, Nature [Human Behaviour], 2023

Female authors typically receive lower advances from publishers - pay gap average of 35.7%, UK Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, 2022

The gender pay gap in publishing in the UK is estimated at 41.4%, with women experiencing a 21% drop in income in real terms between 20217 – 2020. Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, 2022

Books authored by women are typically priced 45% lower than men’s, Weinberg et al, 2018

Just 26.5% of non-fiction book reviews in national UK newspapers are allocated to female writers, Sherwin, Independent, 2023

A Non-Fiction book prize has recently been launched because,?“The publishing industry has encouraged men to write ‘big, important works’ about history and science, while women have often been asked to take on smaller, less visible topics, judged to be less significant.”?Sherwin, Independent, 2023

“Women are credited less?in science than men”, study by Ross et al, Nature, 2022

“Data shows 90% of engineering and physical sciences funding in UK goes to male-led projects” Weale and Barr, Guardian, 2018

“New study of NIH funding says women over all get smaller grants than men, even when controlling for research potential. The findings have implications for their long-term success in academic science.,” Flaherty, Inside Higher Education, 2019

“Male researchers’ ‘vague’ language more likely to win grants.?Grant reviewers favour ‘broad’ words used more often by men, but proposals using those terms don’t produce better research.” Else, Nature, 2019

Women-led start-ups received just 2.3% of VC funding in 2020, McKinsey, 2021

“Just 12% of decision makers in VC firms are women”, McKinsey, 2021

“Some speculate?that the pandemic made investors more wary of risks and more likely to stick to their existing networks — which is very much a "boys club" and tougher for women to break into. And even when going outside their networks, many investors may be sticking with "pattern-matching habits", seeking the same kinds of companies that they’ve supported in the past, which are often tech companies led by men.” Bittner, and Lau, Harvard Business Review, 2021

“Women in the UK launch businesses with 53% less capital on average than men”, Credit Suisse, 2022

“According to City A.M., businesses led by females on average received a staggering 96%?less funding than their male counterparts last year despite growing pressure for gender parity.” Idox, 2022

“Women-founded fintechs have raised a meager 1% of total fintech investment in the last 10 years.” Aleman, Tech Crunch, 2020

“Companies led by women disproportionately attract less investment than those led by men, according to a large-scale study of female entrepreneurship in the UK. The?Gender Index, which was launched on Thursday, is a research study of all 4.4m active UK companies and allows users to track the impact of female-led firms on the economy via an online, interactive tool.?The data identified that just under 17% of all active companies are led by women, but they only managed to attract less than 12% of 1.3m investments made in UK firms.” Partridge, The Guardian, 2022

For those fretting over how to tackle inequality in and beyond STEM, I've written a handy bullet-pointed list to help you out. Again, women of STEM, and more generally, feel free to add some of your handy tips too.

1. Hire women equally
2. Pay women equally
3. Promote women equally
4. Publish women equally
5. Fund women equally

For some, these bullet points speak to a task so challenging as to be up there with finding the Holy Grail or colonising an exoplanet. Indeed, in their eyes, it is more likely scientists will find the elixir of life itself - literally, there are magazine articles that muse about possible breakthroughs that will allow some to live forever. Doubtless, the STEM startups started by men investigating this possibility are attracting vastly more funding than those by women. It's such a given, we don't even have to do a search on the stats to know that.

May it come as some modicum of reassurance to the rest of us that others don't think that achieving the 5-points listed in bullets is tricky. Indeed, we marvel at how it could possibly be that some consider this task to be complex. That some imagine it'll take until some time next century to achieve parity - it's mind-blowing that anyone could have such an abject failure of imagination, agency, and ideas.

I could expand on this subject at length. Then again, why bother when two short words can convey, fully, I think, the state of affairs. It sucks.