Inclusive recruitment will help to counter the long-standing problems faced by STEM employers – first, that there simply aren’t enough people to fill the roles, and second, that women and other people with protected characteristics are under-represented in the STEM pipeline.
Improving inclusive recruitment will deliver the business benefits and employee satisfaction already discussed, it will also help to plug the STEM skills gap.
However, the number of women in the Core-STEM workforce is currently low. They made up just 26.6% at the end of December 2021 according to our latest statistics, based on data from the ONS.
The figure was even lower for the technology sector at 21%.
Of all the STEM areas, representation of women in lowest in engineering at 12.5%.
Under-representation is a problem for other groups too and we shall explore this in the next section. An awareness of this will help support the case for an inclusive recruitment strategy.