Taking STEM Diversity to the NEXT LEVEL

Published in

thoughts-by-humans

5 min readOct 9, 2018

Our Head Human Laura attended an amazing event a few weeks ago at the Alan Turing Institute. The aim of this STEM Gamechangers event was to come up with ideas to address diversity in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). This awesome event has spurred on a new next initiative for taught by humans!

What do we mean by “addressing diversity”?
It’s simple really. The STEM workforce (both inside and outside of academia) is not representative or inclusive of all those in society. Examples of this:

women make up basically 50% of the UK population. However, they only make up 23% of the STEM workforce (according to WISE¹)
BAME students make up 1/5 of STEM courses at university. Yet BAME men are 28% less likely to go onto work in STEM careers than white men²

Other areas of diversity that sorely need addressed are ways to improve inclusivity of LGBTQ+ people, disabled people (including those with mental health problems) and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

The UK is facing a skills shortage in STEM, thus an effort is needed to encourage a more diverse range of people to pursue these skills. We want a fair and inclusive work force, we want anyone to be able to pursue whatever career they want and not be held back. It’s also been proven that increasing diversity increases innovation in companies⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷. AND if those aren’t good enough reasons, it’s good business sense — it leads to more money (according to one study⁸ diverse companies have 19% more profits!).

What did we do to “address diversity”?

Team *Next Level in Action — we’re a passionate bunch and we’re all hands*

The lovely organisers of the event got us to self organise into groups based on what issues we wanted to address (using Post-It notes, of course). Myself and Paul wanted to work on ideas to address hard to reach children, those who don’t often receive the same opportunities as others. Floriane and Shadab wanted to build a sustainable mentoring scheme. So the four of us combined to work on a sustainable mentoring scheme aimed at hard to reach children, called Next Level.

Here’s a pitch of our idea.

Tweet of our pitch on the day (we were bold — no slides!)

How do children find out about careers?

Generally, it’s from their parents, family and teachers. This means a lot of children don’t get exposed to careers that might be perfect for them. Take Floriane for example, she was sure we wanted to be a lawyer. Then just before she choose her GCSEs, she attended a mentoring event and met a mechanical engineer. Speaking to them she realised mechanical engineering was a better career for her skills and desires, and she is now at university studying to become one (and inspiring lots of others to follow in her footsteps). This story is rare, and Floriane knows she is really lucky her teacher helped her get this opportunity. We want to her story to become the norm for every child.

Our idea is to start a mentoring scheme, Next Level, to help children (particularly those who receive free school meals or live in areas of deprivation) to find out about a range of careers and have someone else to chat to about career ideas. This could hopefully ease pressure on careers and teachers.

We know lots of amazing mentor schemes already exist (including the Prince’s Trust and STEMETTES) and we’d love to partner with them on future events. But we think there’s always room for more (or the diversity problem would be fixed), and we’ve got some ideas how to make ours something extra. A study by the Children’s Comissioner into how effective mentoring is has shown that long-term relationships driven by the child have the best impact on the mentees⁹. We want to ensure the scheme is:

long-term
mentee-directed
sustainable (in a pay-it-forward sense)
CV enhancing (for both the mentor and the mentee)

We will host a one day kick off event with a range of activities to help the mentees choose a mentor, and to decide what they want from the next six months of the scheme and how to realistically achieve that. Mentees decide they want to learn about a certain topic or industry, or to improve a skill (such as coding, writing or speaking). Therefore, mentors could help their mentee work on a small project, for example researching interesting Virtual Reality news stories that week, coming up with a Fintech business idea or learning how to analyse a small dataset. These small projects will help with soft skills, such as confidence and thinking for themselves, and would really stand out on a student’s CV when the time comes to apply for a job, an apprenticeship or to university.

The children will also go back to their schools and communities as ambassadors for their “career” and the company. This means they could be given some swag to hand out and, if they want to, they can give presentations about what they have learnt at school.

In six months, we’ll all meet up again and have a big review session before planning the next six months.

We’re planning our first event in central London, but we have UK-wide plans. Please let us know if you want to get involved:

volunteers- we need some inspiring people to help the event run smoothly
mentors- if being a mentor and helping some children learn about career possibilities sounds like something you want to do, get in contact
sponsors- if any companies want to officially sponsor the event, we would love to hear from you
children- if you are a teacher or work with children who you think would benefit from being involved, please let us know. For the time-being, our target age range will be Year 9 children (before they make their firm GCSE choices)

Send us an email on: humans@taughtbyhumans.com

Or visit our website to find out more about us and the Next Level initiative.