Women in STEM: Statistics, Careers and the Gender Gap in 2026
How many women work in STEM in the UK? Which subjects have the largest gender gaps? The answer depends considerably on what — and who — we count.
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Long-form stories about discovery, invention and the women whose work changed what we know, what we build, and how we live.
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The Journal grows alongside the museum, connecting scientific history with the people, experiments and ideas behind it.
Engineering’s Missing Half
Women make up only around one in five Engineering and Technology undergraduates in England. The gap begins long before university — but the most revealing evidence may be what happens to women who already have the subjects that can lead them there.
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The STEM Gender Gap Isn’t Where You Think It Is
Women are often described as underrepresented in STEM. Fourteen years of higher-education data reveal something considerably more complicated.
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When Did Computing Become a Man’s World?
Programming was once a field in which women were unusually visible. Then computing became more prestigious, more professionalised and more culturally masculine. What happened?
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The Women Who Changed Our Understanding of the Universe
Six astronomers uncovered the distance, composition, evolution, and hidden structure of the cosmos.
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The Women Who Built the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence
How Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Karen Spärck Jones, Fei-Fei Li and others built the infrastructure behind modern AI
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10 Inventions by Women That Changed Everyday Life
From windscreen wipers and dishwashers to Kevlar, home security and IVF, these stories show how women helped shape technologies that became part of ordinary life.
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15 Women Scientists Who Changed How We Understand the World
Fifteen scientists, fifteen ideas, and a journey through the discoveries that changed how we understand matter, stars, genes, medicine and the universe.
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Women Who Helped Invent the Modern Computer
The modern computer was never one invention. Meet the women who helped shape programming, software engineering, search, interfaces, networking and the machines we use today.
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The Women Behind the Science of DNA, Genes and the Human Body
From chromosomes and DNA structure to embryos, cancer genes, genome editing and mRNA, these women helped reveal how biological information becomes a human body.
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The Nobel Prize and the Women Science Forgot
The Nobel Prize can immortalise a discovery. It can also compress a complicated scientific history into a handful of names.
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Women Engineers Who Built the Modern World
The bridges, machines, networks and systems that became ordinary life were built through generations of engineering — and women were part of that work.
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Why Were So Many Women Scientists Written Out of History?
The problem was not simply that history forgot women. Scientific institutions also shaped whose work became visible enough to remember.
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The Women Behind the Medicines That Changed Modern Healthcare
How scientific problems became treatments, diagnostics and technologies that changed what medicine could do
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