International Women's Day 2025 is on March 8, with its theme this year 'Accelerate Action', a campaign calling for swifter progress in the global race towards achieving gender equality.
Gender parity is something UK employers and training providers continue to tackle as they look to attract more female apprentices into sectors traditionally seen as male dominated such as building and construction.
Although the total number of women and men starting apprenticeships is broadly equal, there is still a gender equality gap when it comes to Science, Technology, Engineering and Manufacturing, the STEM subjects. Women are also seriously underrepresented in the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Latest Government data for England published in January 2025 reveals that female apprentices fractionally outnumbered their male counterparts, accounting for 52.2% of all apprenticeship starts in 2023/2024.
But a deeper dive into the data by sector clearly shows that women apprentices still have some ground to make up in areas such as engineering, manufacturing, construction and digital technology.
In Construction, Planning and the Built Environment, the statistics show there were 24,230 starts in total of which 2,420 were female apprentices. And although that's 160 up on the previous year, women still accounted for less than 10% of the overall number.
It was a similar story in Engineering, Manufacturing and Technologies' where women, at 4,700, made up just over 10% of the 45,800 apprenticeship starts.
Digital Technology fared slightly better where female learners accounted for around 36.4% of the 27,090 apprentices joining programmes.
On a more optimistic note, however, the number of starts by women apprentices in all these STEM subgroups were slightly up on those for 2022/2023.
As in previous years, non-STEM areas such as Retail, Health and Administration - traditionally sectors that employ a lot of women - have a much higher ratio of female to male apprentices.
Of the apprentice starts in Business, Admin and Law, 54,700 were women compared with 40,180 men. Health, Public Service ad Care showed a much more marked gender difference with female apprentice numbers at 74,350 making up over 78% of starts in 2023/24.
Plugging the skills gaps in the digital age
While industries such as engineering and construction are making some headway in attracting female learners, the rapidly emerging AI employment sector has some way to go.
According to a recent commissioned by the UK government AI Opportunities Action Plan, only 22% of people working in AI are women.
Gender diversity is also an issue in cyber security where women make up just 17% of the workforce and only 12% hold senior roles. Research and analysis in the UK government's report Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2024 found that signs of an upward trend in 2022 had not been sustained.
With the government committed to achieving economic growth through skills, employers and training providers are being encouraged to address these skills gaps through training schemes which promote diversity and tackle gender disparity.
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