By, Amelia Edwards, Fourth year, English and French
As an English and French student at Bristol University, lecture halls are a sea of creative, book-loving, and mostly female students, just like me. However, girls enrolled in STEM courses often face a remarkably different reality.
Emma Flores studies biochemistry at Bristol, a subject often perceived as more rigorous — and more male-coded — than the humanities. When asked if men outnumber women on her course, she replied that the ratio of men to women feels like a near-even ‘50/50 split’.
In the 2022/23 academic year, the proportion of female and non-binary students enrolling into physical science subjects, including biochemistry, was approaching half at UK universities. However, in computer sciences, engineering, and technology, male students made up over three-quarters of their cohort. In most STEM subjects, male students are vastly overrepresented.
Even within a more gender-balanced STEM field, Emma explained that there’s a strong sense in labs and lectures that ‘men control the room’.
‘In labs and lectures, men control the room’.
For another STEM student at Bristol, her course often feels like a hostile environment for both female students and lecturers, whether they are sexualised or belittled. Viewed as an ‘anomaly’ in a male-dominated field, she was told by one male student that her choice of degree was only to ‘prove a point’, that men are intrinsically drawn to ‘objects and thinking’ whilst ‘girls like feelings and emotions’.
‘Men are drawn to ‘objects and thinking’ whilst girls like ‘feelings and emotions’.
With outdated stereotypes etched into every corner of academia, society’s perceptions of women’s place in STEM reach far deeper than numbers and ratios. In contrast, some subjects are overwhelmingly represented by women— and where female students gravitate, misogyny often follows. Traditionally perceived as female-coded and more approachable than STEM, over half of arts and humanities enrolments at UK universities in 2021/22 were women.
However, conversations about female representation in science and maths are rarely matched by efforts to increase the number of men in the arts. This is perhaps rooted in the fact that society often puts male-dominated STEM subjects on a pedestal — seen as logic-driven, profitable, and demanding — over female-leaning fields, deemed frivolous, soft and unchallenging.
Last year, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vowed to grow the economy by scrapping so-called ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’ — mostly non-STEM subjects — in favour of skilled apprenticeships. When I’m asked what I study at university, my answer is often met with ‘so, what do you plan to do afterwards?’, as opposed to the inevitable ‘wow’ that follows degrees in medicine or aerospace engineering.
Even in STEM fields, the gender pay gap fell at 19% in 2024. Whichever sector women choose, they can’t escape deep-rooted patriarchal imbalances. Although Eleanor Gibbs — a third year studying cancer biology and immunology at Bristol — has never personally experienced bias from lecturers or staff at university, her family friend felt ‘squashed by male colleagues’ as a woman in a STEM workplace. Warned that graduate schemes might ‘only take 1 or 2 women’ out of any five accepted candidates, Eleanor’s perspective reflects the anxieties instilled into female students pursuing STEM careers beyond university.
Evy Tang
Sanya Saxena
For Sidney Bartolotta, a master's student at Bristol, studying her BSc in Economics at Bath brought many ups and downs. During her first two years, she ‘often found that [her] ideas were not considered in the same way as her male colleagues’ when discussing answers’, outnumbered by men in a course with a 60/40 gender split. Though Sidney’s final year brought ‘fantastic lecturers — both male and female’, inspiring her and other girls on her course to feel ‘excited about [their] place in the subject’, she also felt obliged to go the extra mile navigating a male-dominated space.
Whether women are faced with an uphill battle in STEM spaces not built for them, belittled for their Arts degrees, or boxed into narrow stereotypes, gender-based bias across academia is rooted in the same hierarchy. To build a fairer system, it is essential to knock down the barriers that silence women in all corners of society — in academic spaces and in the workplace — to ensure that female voices are both heard and valued.
Featured image: Julia Koblitz / Unsplash
Do you think there's still barriers for women in STEM?
