The United Kingdom's women-in-STEM landscape in September 2020 was shaped by two overlapping disruptions that made it difficult to separate underlying trends from emergency conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic had been disrupting UK universities since March, with the differential impacts on women researchers that this publication had anticipated in its March 2020 analysis already becoming visible in early submission data from journals and in anecdotal reports from research funders. Simultaneously, the Brexit transition was in its final months: the UK's departure from the European Union's research funding frameworks was scheduled to complete on December 31, 2020, and the implications for UK researchers' participation in European research networks were still substantially uncertain.
These two disruptions were not independent for women researchers. The research workforce most exposed to both was women at early and mid-career stages who depended on European research partnerships for grant funding, for postdoctoral positions, and for the research mobility that built international scientific profiles. The combination of pandemic-driven caregiving demands and Brexit-related funding uncertainty was a compounded risk that was not equally distributed across the UK research workforce.
WISE Annual Workforce Data
WISE (Women into Science and Engineering) published annual data on women's representation in the UK STEM workforce. The 2020 data showed women constituting approximately 24 percent of the UK's core STEM workforce — a figure that had improved slowly over the preceding decade but remained substantially below parity. In engineering and technology specifically, women represented approximately 16 percent of the engineering workforce, and the figure for some engineering disciplines was lower still.
WISE's "People Like Me" campaign, which used research on the identity and values of young women to redesign how STEM careers were communicated to them in secondary school, had been a notable methodological contribution to the field. The campaign's approach — rather than telling girls that STEM needed them (an appeal to belonging in a domain they may have already decided was not for them), it identified the characteristics of girls who did pursue STEM careers and communicated those careers in terms that resonated with those characteristics — had influenced how several other countries designed their STEM participation campaigns.
Athena SWAN: A Decade of Departmental Accountability
The Athena SWAN programme, which had been operating since 2005 and had expanded substantially in the 2010s, was by 2020 a significant feature of the UK research landscape. The programme required universities and departments to conduct audits of their gender data — at every career stage, in every process affecting hiring, promotion, and career development — and to develop action plans for addressing the gaps they found. Bronze, Silver, and Gold awards recognised departments at different stages of the transformation process.
The Athena SWAN model's influence had extended well beyond the United Kingdom: the framework had been adapted in Ireland, Australia, Canada, and several other countries, and its accountability mechanism — requiring gender data collection and public commitment to improvement as conditions for award maintenance — had been influential in thinking about institutional gender equity programmes globally.
The critical assessment of Athena SWAN's impact, as it existed in 2020, was positive but qualified. Institutions that had invested seriously in the process — conducting genuine audits, implementing substantial changes in hiring criteria and promotion processes, collecting longitudinal data on career-stage outcomes by gender — had shown measurable improvements. Institutions that had treated the award process as a documentation exercise rather than an institutional transformation had less to show. The Athena SWAN Silver and Gold awards, which required evidence of implemented change rather than only plans for change, were better predictors of genuine departmental transformation than the Bronze award.
Brexit and the Research Funding Transition
The UK's position in European research frameworks was, as of September 2020, one of the most consequential uncertainties in its science policy landscape. UK researchers had been major participants in Horizon 2020, the European Union's flagship research and innovation funding programme, receiving grants as principal investigators, as consortium partners, and as postdoctoral researchers. Whether the UK would negotiate association to Horizon Europe (the successor programme) or would be excluded was not yet determined.
For women researchers specifically, the Brexit research funding question had particular dimensions. Postdoctoral researchers — who were, as documented in the pipeline literature, disproportionately early-career women — were among the most mobile participants in the European research system. A UK postdoctoral researcher doing a fellowship in Germany, or a German postdoctoral researcher on a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at a UK university, was in a different legal and financial situation after December 31, 2020 than before. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions, which specifically supported researcher mobility within Europe, were a funding stream that was disproportionately used by early-career researchers and that was at direct risk from UK exclusion from Horizon Europe.
The uncertainty itself had effects: UK universities had been receiving reports of researchers declining positions because of uncertainty about long-term funding eligibility, and of consortium-building processes for Horizon Europe bids hesitating over UK partnership out of concern that UK participants might be excluded from the final award. These effects were not uniformly distributed: researchers whose projects required large, multi-country European consortia were more affected than those whose research was nationally self-contained.
The Pandemic and UK Women Researchers: Early Signals
By September 2020, the early signals from the pandemic's effect on research output by gender were beginning to appear in academic discussion. Several journals had begun publishing submission statistics showing increased male-to-female submission ratios compared to pre-pandemic periods, consistent with the predictions from the double-burden literature. UK-specific data was not yet fully analysed, but the pattern was consistent with the predictions this site had made in March 2020.
UK research funders, including the Medical Research Council, the BBSRC, and some university Research Excellence Framework (REF) preparation processes, had begun discussing whether pandemic-related career interruptions should be explicitly factored into research output evaluations. The REF 2021 exercise had made some accommodations, but the adequacy of those accommodations for women who had borne disproportionate caregiving burdens during the school closures was not yet clear.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is WISE and what does it measure?
WISE (Women into Science and Engineering) is a UK campaign that publishes annual data on women's representation in the UK STEM workforce and develops programmes to increase that representation. Its annual People Like Me workforce data is the primary public source for tracking women's share of core STEM roles in the UK.
What is Athena SWAN?
Athena SWAN is a gender-equity accreditation programme for UK higher education institutions and departments, requiring gender data audits and action plans. Bronze, Silver, and Gold awards recognise departments at different stages of gender-equity transformation. The programme has been influential internationally as a model for departmental accountability.
How did Brexit affect women researchers in the UK?
The most direct risk was to early-career researchers dependent on European funding — particularly Marie Skłodowska-Curie mobility fellowships and Horizon programme partnerships. Women were disproportionately represented in these early-career mobile positions. The Brexit transition period ended December 31, 2020; whether the UK would negotiate Horizon Europe association remained unresolved as of September 2020.
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