International Women’s Day

Baroness Smith of Malvern Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Lords Chamber

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[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.