By James Lewis, SciTech Deputy Editor and Miles Gilroy, SciTech Deputy Editor
It’s so often the case that we pat ourselves on the back and applaud the growth of female participation in STEM. Growing yes, but the fact remains that men are dramatically overrepresented in the STEM workforce. More than two times overrepresented; in 2024, women made up only 30 percent of the UK’s workforce and of today’s STEM graduates, only 35 percent are women. Epigram sat down with Sena Polat, Technical Officer, and Malcom Kazimil, President, of the student led group Robogals to find out what they’re doing to break the lock on this boy’s club.
Founded in Melbourne in 2008, the organisation is now global, with over 30 chapters in 10 countries. After a period of inactivity, the University of Bristol’s chapter was revived last year by the hard work of their committee who, Malcom explained, ‘achieved so much with limited resources’ and managed to get themselves into schools and achieve re-affiliation with the SU. This year, Robogals have taken it ‘to the next level’ now that they’re off the ground once again.
Robogals’ sessions involve ‘coding, programming, and crash courses’ Sena explains. They’ve run a series of workshops in primary schools for the last year and a half since the group’s re-affiliation, hoping to impress the importance, but also the rewards, of ‘a creative engineering mindset’ on young students across Bristol.
Sena and Malcom share an unwavering commitment to dismantling the old ways of thinking and prove to their students that they, just as much as anyone, have a right to consider a career in STEM. Sena makes the point that girls ‘are really excited about the idea of STEM’, but when ‘they see the field and they see it’s 99 percent boys’ they ‘lose that momentum’ and end up feeling ‘discouraged.’
Above all, Robogals want to be that proof-of-concept – evidence to anyone interested in STEM that nothing can hold you back, especially your gender. Malcom told Epigram that ‘we’re trying to provide them people to look up to’. They want to be a role model – to prove if we can do it, you can too.
In fact, research suggests that if girls ‘know or see a woman’ in STEM, they are 33 percent more likely to pursue a career in the field. Sena recalls how she ‘had to find [her] own way and find [her] own role models.’ She hopes that Robogals can reassure their students; ‘just knowing that they have any kind of role model, even if it’s just a friend or just us’ pays extraordinary dividends to that girl’s outcome in life.
And some role models they are; they educated 150 students last year and intend to reach 250 this term alone. With plans for a workshop in Cardiff, the group have no intention of slowing down. They appreciate, though, that this can be an uphill struggle because they ‘can’t just email every school and expect them to be like “oh, cool, let’s just invite some random uni students in.”’ Sena calls this ‘the main bottle neck’ of their mission.
Malcom and Sena are confident they have enough volunteers for an expanded programme, but they still must deal with their ‘really old’ gear. Sena pulled out one of the laptops that they borrow from another out-reach organisation at the university. Almost a relic, it’s about two inches thick and, while it would still confuse your grandmother, the children of today are as tech-savvy as any BA student. Malcom believes that new computers would not only enable Robogals to do more, but they would also be more ‘exciting’ for a generation who have only seen a DVD in a museum.
Greater girls’ participation in STEM careers dismantles what has been accepted in the field for years, but, in an advancing and increasingly technological era, their participation is a need not a want. If the government is serious about their intended goal of a net-zero future by 2050, then hundreds of thousands of new jobs will be created. Estimates vary between 135,000 to 725,000 new jobs, in the green sector alone.
We need Robogals. We need people out there inspiring, teaching, challenging the antiquated dons. While ‘it’s easy to complain: “oh, there's not enough girls in STEM,’’’ Sena says ‘the best way to change that is to get into a position of power and create a community and make changes within that community.’
‘It’s a good time to be alive right now in the sense that there is so much to do right now’ Malcom says. It’s true, the future is bright; Sena believes, knows rather, that ‘in [her] lifetime we’ll see an equal split.’
While it’s sometimes easy, perhaps comforting, to think that growing gender equity is a natural progression for humans to make, it's not. It requires salt of the earth hard work to disrupt ingrained cultural, social, and linguistic phenomena that keep certain fields of work dominated by one group. Robogals are those change makers, without whom things wouldn’t change.
This is the second in SciTech's IWD 2025 series. Read the first instalment here!
Featured Image: Robogals
