Maximising Returns

In November 2000 People Science & Policy Ltd was commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry to undertake a study to investigate the following questions:

What is the size of the population of SET-qualified women who are not in SET employment?
What barriers do potential returnees see preventing them form returning to SET employment?
What are employers doing to help?
What programmes are in operation to assist SET-qualified women to return?

To complete the study we used a variety of techniques, including qualitative research, literature surveys and secondary analysis of existing datasets. The project was undertaken in collaboration with the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick who completed a major analysis of data from the UK Labour Force Survey. Further information about IER can be found at www.warwick.ac.uk/ier.

Our report was submitted in the autumn of 2001 and formally published by the DTI on January 21 2002.

Some of the key findings were

Women in SET occupations

  • The number of women of working age with SET degrees has risen from 240,000 in 1992 to 290,000 in 2000.
  • Between 1992 to 2000 the number of female SET graduates employed in SET occupations rose from just under 50,000 to nearly 65,000.
  • One-third of women SET graduates entered SET occupations in 2000.
  • 25% of all women SET graduates are employed in SET occupations.
  • Number of women in computing has increased from about 14,000 in 1992 to around 19,000 in 2000.

The effect of children

  • Women with SET degrees are less economically active than their male counterparts or female non-SET graduates.
  • Women with dependent children under five are the least likely to be employed and there is little difference between SET and non-SET degree holders.
  • Women with SET degrees with dependent children all aged over five, were increasingly less likely to be employed in the period 1992 to 2000 and were less likely to be employed than their non-SET graduate counterparts.
  • SET graduate women in SET occupations are less likely to work part-time.
  • There is little difference in the usual hours worked per week or in the prevalence of shift working between female SET graduates working in SET and non-SET occupations.

Returning

  • There has been an average of about 5,000 women SET graduates returning to SET employment per year during the latter part of the 1990s.
  • In 2000 economically inactive female SET graduates provided a pool of approximately 50,000 potential returners.
  • About 24,000 women SET graduates returned to employment in 2000; about a third of them returned to SET occupations.
  • Between two thirds and three quarters of women with SET degrees, who were not working at the time of the LFS interview, had been out of employment for at least two years and almost 40% have been out of employment for at least five years.

Employers

  • Companies are making increasing efforts to retain their staff during family formation through a mix of maternity packages, flexible working practices, crèche facilities, etc.
  • Employers are unlikely to make specific investment to attract returners because the likelihood of finding and successfully recruiting women returners is very low for any individual company.
  • The recruitment of managers from outside and increasing staff turnover mid-career, opens up opportunities for returners.
  • Given limited resources for recruitment, companies focus on new graduates. This is a large, obvious and easily located source of appropriately skilled people.
  • There is increasing acknowledgement of the importance of transferable skills, such as interpersonal skills.

Flexibility

  • Within SET, science appears to be less flexible than engineering or IT. Areas of research or where staff need access to hazardous substances or specialist infrastructure are less flexible in the way in which they are organised than other areas of SET, as is production management. IT is more flexible in this respect.

Other key facts and figures

Number of people of working age with degrees (in any subject) has risen from 3.5 million in 1992 to 5.4 million in 2000.

The number of SET graduates in the working age population has increased from 1.1 million in 1992 to 1.3 million in 2000

The proportion of SET degree holders relative to other subjects has declined from 32% of all graduates in 1992 to 25% in 2000.

The employment rate of male SET and non-SET graduates is very similar at about 91%. SET.