The latest government workforce data, as of end of June 2022, continues to show a positive increase in the percentage of women making up the Core-STEM workforce. This percentage has climbed from 26.6% in December 2021, to 26.9%.
Women engineers have seen a good uplift and now account for 13.6%, up from 12.5% last December. The proportion of women working in SET Management (18.7%) and Science Professionals (51.5%) has also grown.
Unfortunately, the number of women IT Professionals and those in IT Technician roles has fallen – from 21.0% to 19.9%, and 26.3% to 25.9% respectively.
WISE will continue to update these headline figures on a quarterly basis as and when Annual Population Survey (APS) data is released. A more in depth analysis of this data – looking at trends across the years – will be released in April each year.
Update to SOC codes
Please note, that we have updated the SOC codes used from SOC 2010 to SOC 2020. For more information from ONS about this revision, please click here.
Data Sources
Core STEM includes science, engineering, and information and communications technology. Health occupations are not included within the scope of core STEM. Although skilled trades are not included within the scope of core STEM, WISE monitors the participation of women in in these roles because of the scale of employment.
This analysis has been produced based on government figures from the Annual Population Survey (APS). The previous WISE analysis used the Labour Force Survey (LFS); Following changes, we now use the APS.
The APS uses a larger sample size than the LFS, which should make its results more accurate and which allows for additional data to be published. The APS also has a smaller sampling error than the LFS, due to differences in how the data is collected.