On the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the United Kingdom in collaboration with ASEAN Secretariat opened applications for the second year of Women in STEM Scholarships under the ASEAN-UK Supporting the Advancement of Girls’ Education (ASEAN-UK SAGE) program. This initiative reaffirms UK’s commitment to empowering women in Southeast Asia and Timor-Leste to overcome barriers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), enabling more women to lead in these fields.

This fully funded scholarship program offers 11 exceptional women from 10 ASEAN Member States (AMS) and Timor-Leste the opportunity to pursue Master’s degrees at two of the UK’s leading universities: The University of Warwick and The University of Manchester.

In AMS, there is a mixed picture of gender parity in access and performance in STEM subjects. Despite outperforming boys in mathematics and science in primary and secondary education, but women remain underrepresented in STEM in tertiary education for only 19.3 percent women compared to 39.8 percent men obtain STEM degrees. Women doctoral degree students are a minority. According to UNESCO, women account for a minority of the world’s researchers. In 2019, fewer than 30 percent of researchers worldwide were women and only 30 percent of female students select STEM-related fields in higher education. Specifically for East Asia and the Pacific, women researchers accounted for 25 percent.

Disparity continues into the workforce, with the 2022 UN progress report on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, Gender Equality, indicating that only 20 percent of jobs in STEM sector are held by women globally and only 16.5 percent women inventors are associated with a patent.

ASEAN-UK SAGE Program tackles gender barriers to basic digital skills for employment, aiming to support the development of basic digital skills for marginalised groups to improve employment opportunities and therefore quality of life, which helps narrow the development gap in ASEAN.

In 2024, the first year of the ASEAN-UK SAGE scholarships, 12 women from nine countries (Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste) went to the UK to study a range of STEM subjects from Environmental Data Science and Machine Learning to Engineering Business Management at master’s level at Imperial College London and the University of Warwick.

The exceptional women who are undertaking the scholarships this year will return to their home countries to launch their STEM careers, driving science and innovation.