Explainer: What Is ‘The Leaky Pipeline’?

Despite making up half of the population, women are still significantly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers.

Interestingly, this isn’t the case at all points along the career trajectory.

While girls might start out along STEM pathways, along each step of the STEM career journey, we see a reduction in participation rates.

This is commonly referred to as the ‘leaky bucket’ or the ‘leaky pipeline’.

The ‘leak’ refers to the phenomenon of women leaving the field of STEM at a higher rate than men.

Representation of girls and women in STEM

To illustrate the ‘leaky’ nature of girls’ and womens’ representation in STEM, consider these facts about gender representation in STEM in Australia, obtained from the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources:

By the time children get to the last year of high school, girls make up approximately 50% of students enrolled in STEM subjects, but the subjects they are enrolling in is skewed. Girls are under-represented in Information and Communication Technology and Design and Technology subjects: 26.3% of Year 12 girls compared to 39.4% of Year 12 boys. There are 3 times more boys enrolled in Year 12 physics. And, girls are half as likely to be enrolled in advanced maths subjects
Within tertiary education, “Women comprised less than 15 per cent of domestic Engineering and Related Technologies undergraduate course completions”
When women enter the workforce, in academic roles (e.g. lecturer in STEM subjects) women represent only 31% of STEM faculty. This additionally contributes to the STEM role models students are being taught by in the classroom and the potential for reinforcement of gender stereotypes. And representation drops dramatically the higher up the career ladder women go: only 14.5% of senior roles in STEM faculty positions.
In engineering careers, women were found to make up only 12.4% of the workforce in 2017.
“Of the STEM qualified population, women comprised only 17 per cent in 2016”

What we can take away from these facts and figures is that there is not only a problem with attracting girls into STEM but that there are many challenges in keeping women in STEM careers and seeing them reach senior positions.

Why is the pipeline leaking?

There are many reasons why women are underrepresented in STEM careers.

Here’s a quick look at some of the most commonly cited barriers to girls and young women entering and staying in STEM professions:

1) The lack of strong female role models – Women who are already in STEM careers can act as mentors and inspire the next generation of women in STEM. Unfortunately, there are still too few women in these fields, which means that girls and young women don’t have enough role models to look up to. More about the importance of role models can be found in our earlier blog post explaining why positive role models are so important.

2) Gender bias and discrimination – This can take many forms, such as employers not offering the same opportunities to women as they do to men, or judging women’s work less harshly than men’s.

3) Societal pressure to choose “traditional” female careers – Even though more girls are choosing to enter STEM fields, there is still a lot of pressure from society to choose traditional female-dominated careers.

4) Unsupportive work environments – This can include a lack of flexible work hours, job insecurity, and hostile work culture.

Why is a lack of representation concerning?

We should be concerned about the under-representation of women in STEM fields because it means that around half of the population is missing out on potentially lucrative and fulfilling careers.

And very importantly, under-representation means that we’re not making the most of our talent and that we’re not using all of our resources to solve the world’s problems.

When people aren’t represented in conversations about the creation of STEM products and/or services, their perspective is lost. In her book ‘Invisible Women‘, Caroline Criado Perez highlights the bias in a world built without concern for all gender perspectives.

While you might be socially primed to think that representation should be a 50:50 split, according to SAGE, the ideal gender balance is actually 40:40:40 i.e. 40% women, 40% men, 20% of any gender.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2021:

“Another generation of women will have to wait for gender parity, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021. As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be felt, closing the global gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 years to 135.6 years.”

135.6 years seems like far too long to wait!!!

To learn more, here are some additional resources

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