Women in science: how can companies shift the balance?

Tech companies and the research community are currently facing a gender conundrum: often criticized for under-representing women in their workforces (which is unfortunately true), today they want to hire more women than ever!

There is indeed general agreement that gender balance benefits performance and that no job in science and industry is exclusive to a given sex, if only by social construction.

Recent progress in closing the gender gap has been insufficient, partly because of a lack of resources on the job market. Today, companies and research organisations like ours are seeking to hire women with scientific or STEM-related backgrounds – and we cannot find enough of them.

To a large extent, we are paying the price for the failure of public policies to prevent girls from dropping science at school, which they do at higher rates than boys, the earliest signs of which start to appear at the age of six.

Efforts to shift the gender balance are also undermined by a deep cultural bias about the role of women in society. Admittedly, a lot has changed in recent years, but some of these stereotypes are insidiously persistent. We know for example that the choice of subjects in secondary school is still influenced by false narratives, which deter girls from studying science on the grounds that scientific subjects are too difficult or that STEM-related careers are incompatible with family life.

No doubt we need to make a determined effort to reduce these stereotypes. I fear however that it might take years to scrupulously and definitively rid our collective imagination of these deeply ingrained biases.

We simply don't have time to wait for this to happen.

Why? Because there is an urgent need to correct an injustice that has existed far too long. We know that studying science and engineering leads to better-paid jobs, on average, with higher levels of responsibility. And the fact that men outnumber women in these disciplines at school is one of the indirect causes of the inequalities in pay and career opportunities that continue to penalise women today.

It is also urgent to act because we're going to need the very best that technology and science can offer if we want to step up to the major challenges ahead (climate crisis, talent shortages, aging populations, etc.).

Beyond the moral considerations, the under-representation of women in scientific fields is clearly damaging to overall efficiency. In economic terms, we could qualify this as "sub-optimal talent allocation" because, statistically speaking, men are occupying roles that would have been better suited to women, if women had been allowed to express their true potential.

Overcoming gender stereotypes may be a long process, but I am sure we can move the needle in the short term by changing perceptions about science and industry. Both fields still too often conjure images of a bygone era: dehumanized and tayloristic factories, solitary geeks at their computer screens and mad scientists locked in their laboratories.

This outdated vision of science and technology seems to be particularly unappealing to young women, who then tend to perpetuate another well-known bias by choosing careers with greater perceived social utility such as care-taking roles (women make up the majority of the workforce in the healthcare sector, for example).

The onus is on us, as engineers, researchers and industrial groups, to transform the way that young people perceive our professions. We need to reach out to them - in their schools and on social media - to help them discover a world of science and technology that is an eminently collective endeavour and deeply connected to the societal issues of our times.

By the same token, we need to demonstrate that careers in science and technology are every bit as compelling for women as they are for men. Every day at Thales, I meet women with a real passion for what they do, and I firmly believe in the value of connecting women scientists with young people, as various projects are successfully doing in France (for example the "Femmes de Tech" project at the Académie des Technologies and the programmes run by Elles Bougent and the Fondation L'Oréal) . Because beyond the speeches and iconic images of Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin, it is through close, personal contact with real-life role models with that we can inspire girls and young women to follow the vocations that the world so badly needs.

[1] ELFE report, INED, 2022