Women in Global Science & Technology

A primer on where women's participation in science and technology stands worldwide — the measurement frameworks that quantify it, the institutions that shape its funding and policy environment, and the structural gaps that the next generation of programs are trying to close.

The shape of the participation gap, in 2026

"Women in global science and technology" is shorthand for a measurement problem and a policy problem that sit on top of each other. The measurement problem: how do we count women's participation in science and technology consistently enough across 190+ countries to know what's actually working? The policy problem: how do we close the participation gaps that the measurement reveals?

UNESCO's most recent UIS Fact Sheet series and the OECD's Education at a Glance reports converge on a picture that is more nuanced than the popular framing suggests. Women are now a majority of higher-education graduates in most regions of the world, including most STEM fields broadly defined. The persistent gaps are narrower than "women in STEM" suggests — they cluster in specific subdisciplines (computer science, engineering, physics) and at specific career stages (mid-career retention, senior research leadership, founder-level entrepreneurship in deep-tech sectors).

The pattern is consistent across high-, middle-, and low-income countries: the participation funnel narrows at each stage, and it narrows most sharply at exactly the points where institutions structure career advancement — graduate-school admissions, tenure decisions, R&D funding allocations, and series-A venture investments. Programs designed to address the funnel work best when they target a specific narrowing point with a specific intervention, not the abstract problem in general.

The major institutional players

A handful of international institutions do most of the gender-and-STEM measurement, advocacy, and program coordination work that's visible at the policy level. Anyone working seriously in this space will encounter their reports, frameworks, and convening processes:

• UNESCO — through the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) produces the most widely cited cross-country data on women researchers, R&D personnel, and tertiary STEM enrollment. UNESCO also runs the L'Oréal–UNESCO For Women in Science program, which has supported more than 4,000 women researchers since 1998.
• OECD — produces the indicators most often cited in high-income-country policy debates, particularly Education at a Glance and the Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook.
• OWSD (Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World) — administers fellowships and runs the most active research-mentoring networks for women scientists in low- and middle-income countries.
• The European Commission — has integrated gender into Horizon Europe research funding requirements, making Europe the largest single funder applying explicit gender criteria to STEM research grants.
• The National Science Foundation (US) — runs ADVANCE, the longest-running institutional-transformation program for women in academic STEM in the world; its results are heavily studied.
• GenderInSITE — an international initiative housed at the InterAcademy Partnership that focuses specifically on the gender dimensions of science, innovation, technology and engineering policy.

Measurement frameworks worth knowing

Practitioners and policy analysts in this field rely on a relatively small number of frameworks to do cross-country comparison and country-level diagnosis. Three of them have shaped the field more than the others:

The Gender Equality and Knowledge Society (GEKS) framework measures women's participation in education, employment, R&D activity, ICT access, and decision-making across the knowledge economy. National scorecards have been produced for multiple countries including India, the Republic of Korea, and South Africa, providing a common vocabulary for benchmarking participation. Read more about the GEKS Scorecard methodology →

The European Commission's She Figures, published roughly every three years, is the most comprehensive comparable dataset on women in research and innovation across the European Research Area. It is the standard reference for EU-level policy discussions.

UNESCO's STEM and Gender Advancement (SAGA) Toolkit provides countries with a step-by-step methodology for collecting sex-disaggregated STEM data when no national statistical infrastructure exists yet — a quiet but critical contribution that has enabled measurement in dozens of countries that didn't previously appear in cross-country comparisons.

Where the structural gaps still are

If you read enough of the recent literature, four patterns emerge as the genuinely hard problems — the ones where after thirty years of programs we still don't have proven, scalable interventions:

• Computer science enrollment. Women's share of computer-science degrees has been flat or declining in many high-income countries since the 1980s peak, despite three decades of programs. The reasons are contested, but the trend is well documented.
• Mid-career attrition. Women leave STEM careers at rates roughly double those of men in the 5-to-15-year post-PhD window. The reasons cluster around caregiving infrastructure, dual-career mobility, and lab-culture factors — all hard to fix with classroom-stage interventions.
• Senior research leadership. Even in fields where women are 40%+ of PhD recipients, they remain 10-15% of full professors, lab directors, and institute heads. The pipeline isn't the bottleneck; the promotion structure is.
• Deep-tech entrepreneurship. Women-founded startups in semiconductors, biotech, and AI infrastructure are dramatically underrepresented relative to women's share of the underlying technical workforce. Investor networks, not technical preparation, appear to be the main constraint.

What this means for the programs in our directory

Most of the programs listed on WIGSAT — summer camps, undergraduate scholarships, bootcamps, graduate fellowships — operate upstream of the four hard problems above. They build the candidate pool. They don't, by themselves, solve mid-career attrition or boardroom-pipeline problems. That's not a criticism: candidate-pool work is essential and visible payoff is now arriving in many fields, especially biological and chemical sciences.

For girls and young women using this site to find a starting point: the field is in better shape than the popular narrative suggests, and the programs in our directory are the ones designed to get you into it. For the policy and funding professionals who arrive here from research citations: the frameworks and institutions referenced above are where the cross-country evidence lives, and they're how the field measures whether anything we're doing actually works.