Baroness Smith of Malvern
That this House takes note of International Women’s Day and the steps being taken to promote women’s participation and leadership in science and technology in the United Kingdom and internationally.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, I first say how pleased I am to open this International Women’s Day debate on my first full day as the Minister for Women and Equalities. In doing so, I take the opportunity to pay tribute to my predecessor, Anneliese Dodds, for the enormously important work that she did in this portfolio.
I also wish the House a very happy—almost—International Women’s Day. The theme of International Women’s Day this year is “Accelerate Action” because, right now, the pace of change just is not fast enough. In recent years—and, I am afraid, with recent Governments—we have seen far too many women left without the safety, security and opportunity they need. That is why the Government are determined to deliver for women through our plan for change, where women are central to all of the Government’s missions: from halving violence against women and girls to kick-starting economic growth, fixing the NHS and breaking down the barriers to opportunity. Through our plan for change, we are making the changes needed to make sure women’s equality becomes a reality. It will be an ambitious agenda for a decade of national renewal, and women will be at the heart of it. This International Women’s Day, we want to celebrate the achievements that have been made towards advancing women’s equality and redouble our commitment to deliver lasting change for women.
There is much that we—and I—could say about the achievements of previous Labour Governments and our plan for change. Today, we are focusing our debate on science and technology. We may not think of this place as a bastion of gender equality—we touched on that just yesterday in an Oral Question—but percentage wise there are more women in the House of Lords, a 1,000-year-old institution, than there are women in tech in the UK, a sector not much more than 100 years old. That gives us a sense of the size of the challenge. If our current trajectory continues, the world will not achieve gender parity until 2158. In the worlds of science and technology, those numbers could be gloomier still.
Our rate of progress will not see women making up an equal share of the tech workforce in the UK for another 283 years. That is an ocean of time—283 years ago, women in the UK could not vote, own land or property if we were married, go to university or enter most professions. Fortunately, we are not willing to let the current pace of change continue. This is a mission-led Government, squarely focused on creating a new era of opportunity and economic growth and a fairer society for all, and gender equality is imperative to that. So today I want to talk about how the Government are accelerating action in the UK and internationally.
First, I will just give a reminder of why this is so important. We should care about all forms of equality in science and technology for their own sake, but we should also care because this drives the betterment of our society and the strengthening of our economy. When women and girls are equally involved in shaping science and tech, the world gets faster breakthroughs, products that work properly and better returns.
We get faster breakthroughs because experts have told us time and again that diverse teams pursue new questions in new ways, leading to better research.
We get products that work because there is a long history of technologies built without women that do not work properly for the whole population. These are set out brilliantly by Caroline Criado Perez in her book Invisible Women, which I am sure many noble Lords have read. Crash-test dummies based on male bodies do not adequately protect women in cars; life-saving drugs, mainly tested on male animals, have a question mark over how they will work for women; and when the first voice assistants were created, they found it harder to recognise female voices because they had been tested only on the all-male developer team who built them. For some of us, that might explain why our phones and speakers do not take any notice of us—or it might be for other reasons.
Finally, we get better returns because businesses and economies stand to gain hugely here. Research consistently finds that gender diversity and ethnic and cultural diversity are both good for business. Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity in their exec teams are 25% more likely to outperform their peers on profit than those in the bottom quartile. Looking at the bigger picture, if women were to start and scale businesses at the rate that men do, we would see a potential £250 billion boost to the UK economy. Without gender equality, our growth mission is stunted.
Let us turn from the why to the what: what this Government are doing to promote women’s participation and leadership in science and technology. “Participation” takes in women as citizens of the digital world as well as creators of it, so we must think about digital exclusion, which disproportionately affects women, as well as online harms that women and girls are up against. My noble friend Lady Jones, closing this debate, may well go into those topics further. With the excellent range of speakers we have today, I am sure there will be plenty for her to respond to.
For now, I will focus on three pillars of improving diversity in science and technology. Skills: how do we make sure that women and girls have the know-how to participate in these sectors and pursue careers in them? Entrepreneurship: how do we support women to start and scale science and tech companies? Industry: how do we protect the rights of women employed by firms in this sector?
On skills, the Digital Poverty Alliance has estimated that if we help everybody currently in work to get essential digital skills, we could see a £17 billion increase in yearly earnings. But if we are to get that boost to the UK economy, we cannot afford to have such a big proportion of our population missing out. Globally, women and girls are 25% less likely than men to have enough digital skills to use technology.
As with everything we discuss today, we must recognise the experiences of the whole range of women in the UK. Women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are much more likely to lack digital skills, as are women with disabilities. The good news is that STEM education is growing. In the 2022-23 academic year, there were 35% more STEM A-level entries from women and girls than in 2010.
Breaking down opportunities is one of the core missions of this Government, so here is how we are making sure that this trend continues in the right direction. Across the board, the curriculum review is considering how to modernise education and qualifications to fit with work in the 21st century. Skills England is reviewing what courses can better fill the digital skills gap. Our new levy-funded growth and skills offer, with apprenticeships at the heart, will deliver greater flexibility for learners and employers in England, aligned with our industrial strategy, creating routes into good, skilled jobs in growing industries. We promote STEM apprenticeships to girls in schools through fantastic volunteers such as STEM ambassadors and apprenticeship ambassadors.
Women’s participation in STEM has improved, but challenges remain. Women now make up 24% of the STEM workforce in the UK, surpassing 1 million for the first time. However, representation remains disproportionately low in certain fields, highlighting ongoing challenges. Higher education is playing a key role in driving change. Universities are implementing mentoring schemes, outreach programmes and gender-balanced research funding to support and retain female talent in STEM.
Early engagement is key to growing that pipeline of women into STEM. Government, employers and education providers are working together to inspire more girls to pursue STEM careers, including through the STEM ambassador programme and industry outreach initiatives. Here are just a couple of further skills programmes of which we are particularly proud. The CyberFirst Girls Competition invites girls aged 12 to 13 to crack codes and solve coding challenges, all to encourage them to pursue a career in cybersecurity. In 2024, 14,500 girls from more than 800 schools took part. On science, the CREST Awards, funded by UKRI, give young people the chance to run their own research projects aimed at solving real-world problems.
Another area where it is crucial that we build up skills is AI. The AI Opportunities Action Plan, launched by the Prime Minister in January, sets out how we will seize the enormous opportunity that AI presents to boost growth, raise living standards and transform our public services. But this opportunity must be open to all. Only 22% of those employed in AI right now are women. Women are also less likely to use AI in their day-to-day lives.
The Government will continue to back AI and data science conversion courses, allowing STEM graduates to gain an AI master’s. It is wonderful to see that 72% of students on these courses so far have been women, far higher than for comparable STEM master’s courses. With support from the DfE, DSIT will explore how to scale up extracurricular activities for girls in schools to cover AI, building on the National Cyber Security Centre’s successful work on cybersecurity skills.
The UK is also opening up opportunities for women and girls around the world. The Girls’ Education Skills Partnership is an £8 million collaboration between the UK, UNICEF and companies such as Unilever, Vodafone and Microsoft. Giving women everywhere the right skills helps them to see new avenues that are open to them, from working as a code breaker to being part of the AI revolution or founding a business of their own.
That takes us to entrepreneurship. Here, let us take a moment to share the story of just one of the brilliant female-founded science and tech companies. Nu Quantum was started by Dr Carmen Palacios-Berraquero as a spin-out from Cambridge. Quantum computing could be our most powerful tool to fight climate change, design better medicines and transform every industry. But to do that, quantum computers need to be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today. That is the challenge the team is working on. It is a team with diversity at its heart. Almost half its employees are women. It has more than 20 nationalities represented and is an LGBT-friendly workplace. Companies such as Nu Quantum are essential for women to look up to, because women are still starting science and tech businesses far less than men do.
When we look at funding challenges, it is little wonder why. Overall, female-founded businesses got just a 1.8% share of total equity investment in the first half of 2024, and that number shrinks further still when we look at the experience of women of colour. In tech, the average deal capital raised by female-founded AI companies is six times lower than that by raised all-male teams.
This Government are supporting female founders across our economy to get the finance that they need. The Women in Innovation programme, run by Innovate UK, has awarded over £11 million to female entrepreneurs since it started, and women now make up one in three successful bids to Innovate UK, up from one in seven. We also back the Invest in Women Taskforce, whose Women Backing Women Fund connects female investors with female-led companies. Specifically in science, the Future Fund invests in R&D-heavy companies in life sciences and deep tech, many of which are headed up by female founders.
As well as helping entrepreneurs find funding, we are supporting the finance sector as a whole to reckon with its role in this. Over 280 companies, including most major retail banks, have now signed up to the Investing in Women code, committing to improve access to finance for women. It is not just a piece of paper. Companies that have signed up are shown to outperform the rest of the market in giving equity to female founders.
The proportion of female-founded businesses around the world has increased steadily in recent years, but we must continue to give them the environment they need to fly, to create new role models for the next generation.
Finally, I turn to industry. We will keep working with science and tech firms to boost gender equality at all levels, particularly in senior roles. The Employment Rights Bill will be a cornerstone here. The Bill will make sure that women, no matter the workplace, are empowered, represented, protected and able to pursue meaningful careers, regardless of whether or not, for example, they plan to start a family. It expands gender pay gap reporting requirements, gives more rights to pregnant workers and new mothers and puts tougher duties on firms to prevent sexual harassment. It also introduces equality action plans, whereby large employers will have to set out what they are doing to improve gender equality. By making sure that science and tech firms foster inclusive working environments, we can make sure these are places where all kinds of people get to succeed.
I am delighted at how popular a debate this is to speak in today and that several Members of this House are about to make their maiden speeches, so I will make way now for them to share their perspectives, and look forward to my noble friend closing our debate, with invaluable insight from her joint roles as Minister with responsibility for science, innovation and tech, and for business and trade. Let me wrap up by reiterating that we do not just improve the participation of women and girls in science and technology because it feels like the right thing to do. We do it because we stand to unlock new realms of scientific advancement, technological innovation and economic growth—the key to everyone being better off—when more women and girls are at the table.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade and Department for Science, Information and Technology (Baroness Jones of Whitchurch) (Lab)
My Lords, I wish a very happy International Women’s Day—nearly—to all noble Lords. We have had an absolutely fabulous debate. I congratulate my noble friend on her new ministerial appointment, and I thank her for setting out the size of the challenge before us, the progress made so far to accelerate action, and where we want to get to.
I thank all noble Lords for their wisdom in this debate—some have of course made their maiden speeches today. First, I thank my noble friend Lady Alexander of Clevedon, whose leadership in Scotland and work in the education sector will add another strong voice championing women in higher education. I thank my noble friend Lady Bousted, who brings her expertise from a world I hail from too—the trade unions, given her role as the joint general secretary of the National Education Union—to help us analyse how to improve the lives of working women. It is wonderful to have another strong voice from Wales in this House, and I thank my noble friend Lord Jones of Penybont for becoming an honorary member of the sisterhood, and for the perspective he brings from his political experience as First Minister of Wales.
It was an honour to hear from my noble friend Lady Rafferty, whose extensive experience in the nursing world—as the president of the Royal College of Nursing, for example—can help us continue to focus on the experience of women working in health and, I hope, improve it. Finally, I thank my noble friend Lady Hunter of Auchenreoch—I will pronounce that right eventually—whose political experience is very welcome, as is her continued support for women in business through her role as a senior adviser at Edelman and her other business roles.
One of the many things that the civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman gave the world is the words:
“You can’t be what you can’t see”.
She meant that it is hard for people to imagine themselves in fields where they do not see people who look or sound like them. So let me begin by paying tribute to some pioneering British women in science and technology. They are not always the ones whose names are attached to the Nobel Prize, and they are not always the ones whose pictures are hanging on the walls in hallowed spaces. They are often the ones whose legacies go unrecorded, but without whose essential work we would not have achieved half the scientific and technological progress we have.
Without Mary Somerville, the 19th-century queen of science, we may not have discovered the planet Neptune. Without Karen Spärck Jones’s work in computational linguistics, we would not have the tech that underpins search engines. In her words,
“Computing is too important to be left to men”.
Without Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, we would not have uncovered the existence of radio pulsars, a by-product of exploding stars that allows us to test some of the most fundamental ideas of physics.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton, Lady Greenfield and Lady Bottomley, reminded us that women have had to overcome sexism and obstruction in some of our many respected academic institutions. Often, that continues today. Thankfully, at the same time, girls have many new role models to look up to. Some of them are paving the way for more people to enter these fields.
I am grateful, for example, to my noble friend Lord Stansgate for reminding us that Helen Sharman was the first UK astronaut. Anne-Marie Imafidon passed her A-level in computing at just 11 years old, and now runs Stemettes, an organisation which gets more women and non-binary people into STEM. Sheridan Ash and Claire Thorne founded Tech She Can to improve the pipeline of women in technological roles. So far, their work has reached 130,000 children.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and my noble friends Lady Alexander and Lord Jones also reminded us that role models can often be nearer and closer to home, since we stand on our mothers’ and our grandmothers’ shoulders. We often reflect on what they could have been and what they could have achieved with the right support. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, reminded us, we have come a long way here in the House of Lords since 1958. My noble friend Lady Hunter reminds us of the excellent women leaders that we have had in this House, including our outstanding current Leader, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith.
We have other outstanding scientific leaders here. For example, in co-founding Darktrace, the noble Baroness, Lady Gustafsson, built one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe, achieving unicorn status in just four years. One of the noble Baronesses we heard from earlier, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, was hugely influential in starting the dotcom boom and has dedicated much of her career to digital and social inclusion. She also now co-chairs an advisory board set up by DSIT to steer our new digital centre of government. I thank her for bringing her expertise to bear here.
My noble friend Lady Gale reminds us of the fight we had to increase the number of women MPs and the success that we can see in the latest intake. As she quite rightly says, this happened not by accident but through very hard and determined work by a number of women.
Like all of us, my own journey shapes how I see these issues. I started my career as a trade union official, representing many low-paid women in the public sector and campaigning for better rights at work—rights that I am pleased to see protected further in the forthcoming Employment Rights Bill. In the nearly 20 years I have been a Labour Peer, I have seen the political environment around me grow more collegiate and more equal. When this Government came into power in July, I was thrilled to be appointed as a Minister for both DSIT and DBT. I can now officially call myself a woman in STEM.
My dual role means that I get to see all the facets that shape women’s participation in science and technology up close, from the subjects girls are encouraged to pick at school, to the investment gap when female entrepreneurs seek funding, to the faces you see around a boardroom table or behind goggles in a lab. What surprised me most when I took office was the mismatch between the talent our science and tech sectors need and how few girls ever see that career as an option. On the one hand, you have top firms struggling to fill vacancies; on the other, many of the girls I meet in schools do not know about the opportunities in these fields or why they should care. Yet these are exciting, creative, well-paid jobs. Globally, tech salaries are more than two-thirds higher than the average. That is a message we must keep shouting about, as it shows girls that people like them work in these worlds because there are opportunities there. To flip Marian Edelman’s words: if you can see it, you can be it.
As my noble friend Lady Smith made clear, we have a long way to go, but we are making progress. Women are progressing in the percentage of STEM sectors that we encourage them to be in. This point was reinforced by the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo. There have been 35% more STEM A-level entries by women and girls since 2010; there are STEM ambassadors in 80% of state schools, 48% of whom are women; and women apprenticeship starts have increased by 7.5% on the previous year. So we are making progress, but of course we have further to go. As my noble friend Lady Bousted pointed out, and I share her hope, the curriculum review will address the unacceptable gender gap in, for example, girls taking GCSE computer science. So I hope that we will address those issues fairly quickly.
Of course, I also take the point made by my noble friend Lady Wilcox, that it is not just about science and technology; we also need the insights and judgments that a grounding in the arts and humanities can bring. I absolutely agree that STEM needs to be redefined as STEAM.
So many noble Lords raised the issue about diversity and the challenges that we face. The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, said that she was angry that we need to shout about this issue again, and I absolutely understand why she feels that why. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, echoed those concerns in her call to resist, in terms of the attacks on women’s rights across the pond. It is such a short-sighted approach in so many ways. As my noble friend Lord Parekh and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones—he is my noble friend—made clear, that attitude means that we are missing out on a distinctive pool of talent, which we could all use and utilise. It is a blind policy in many ways.
I have to make it absolutely clear that in the UK, increasing diversity across all sectors, including science and tech, continues to be a priority for this Government. It is a priority reflected in legislation and which we will continue to uphold. Firms with over 250 employees have had to report on their gender pay gap every year since 2017. As part of the equality Bill being introduced later this year, they will have to report on pay gaps for ethnicity and disability too. Under the forthcoming Employment Rights Bill, companies will also have to publish equality action plans to show what they are doing to improve gender equality. So I can assure my noble friends Lady O’Grady and Lord Davies that the Government are committed to delivering on diversity and on equal pay for work of equal value, as well as to giving women the tools to challenge any secrecy where that occurs. Family-friendly policies are, of course, at the heart of our Employment Rights Bill. We will continue to hold companies in every sector up to a high standard here, and support them as they reap the rewards that we know that greater diversity will bring.
Diversity is vital in its own right, but—as the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, and other noble Lords have pointed out—women also have to be at the table when technology is designed, or we risk inbuilt biases and distorted algorithms. Those are issues that the AI Security Institute and the implementation of the Online Safety Act are determined to address. The noble Baroness illustrated why that is such a challenge and so important to us.
My noble friend Lady Rafferty also made the important point that bias and stereotypes continue to blight recruitment and enhancement in the nursing profession. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Donaghy for highlighting the need to improve women’s health, which is important in its own right, of course, but it also ensures that women are fit, healthy and able to participate fully in the workforce. I reassure her that we are overhauling our policies on women’s healthcare. For example, we are committing an extra £57 million to the Start for Life services for new and expectant mothers.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, raised the important issue of the challenge of sexual and reproductive health. She is right that technology and AI applications can play a hugely important role in transforming women’s health in those areas. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lady Morgan for highlighting the huge contribution that medical research charities play in improving health outcomes, particularly those for and mainly run by women. Those will continue to be important priorities for this Government.
When we think about women’s participation in this world, we must look at two angles. First, we must look at women as shapers of science and technology, making discoveries, founding start-ups and working in industry—a point made by many noble Lords. We must also look at women as users of technology, because there are plenty of issues that disproportionately affect women here. Women around the world are more likely to be excluded from digital life. Where they are included, the online world can be weaponised by abusers to make women and girls feel unsafe. If women do not feel safe online, or do not have the devices, connections or skills to get there in the first place, they are fundamentally left out of the conversation.
My noble friend Lady Hazarika reminded us that women are often the losers as sexual abuse and misogyny become rife on online sites. I can assure her that we are moving at pace to implement the Online Safety Act, but also to identify what more needs to be done. Like her, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, for her groundbreaking report on pornography, which we will now take steps to implement. I remind the House that we are committed to halving violence against women and girls in a decade and moving at pace to achieve that ambition.
I am also very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Casey—I would say “my noble friend”—whose very moving testimony to the 95 women and four children murdered by men pulled us all up short and was a very stark reminder of the challenges we still face in tackling violence against women. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lady Goudie for reminding us of the important role women play globally as peacekeepers and helping to rebuild shattered communities. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for raising the continued global challenge of women’s participation in education and STEM initiatives.
My noble friend Lord McConnell quite rightly raised concerns about women’s rights going into reverse globally. These are challenging times. However, I remind noble Lords that, for example, we are funding UNICEF’s Girls’ Education and Skills Partnership, the Strengthening Higher Education for Female Empowerment programme and the AI for Development Diversity programme in the global South: so a number of these initiatives are continuing.
It has been a privilege to hear from so many in this House today, including many who are themselves role models for women and girls in science and technology. We must continue to give women and girls the tools and skills to make sure that they are not locked out of the digital world. We must continue to make sure that there is a world where they feel safe and we must continue to give women in the UK and around the world more paths to found their own firms, to get into research labs and to reach senior levels in businesses, because we cannot move forward when half the world is held back. Societal progress and growth depend on all of this.
So, I am grateful to noble Lords for all the contributions that have been made this afternoon. I am sorry if I have not managed to pick up every point, but noble Lords will have seen that I have been scribbling madly. All points were extremely well made and I think we have had an excellent debate today. I thank all noble Lords for that.