Australia’s Labour Force Survey reports how many women and men work in occupations each year.
STEM-qualified occupations
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You can use the data below to compare the number of women and men working in STEM, non-STEM and health occupations over different years.
Learn more about the data
The Power BI dashboards in the monitor present data in different formats, including charts, graphs and tables. You can customise these dashboards based on what you're interested in.
- Filter the data: Click the options on the left side of each dashboard and make your selections.
- Find more information about a specific data point: Hover your cursor over the dashboard to reveal more information, such as counts or percentages, if available.
- Reset the page to its original selections: Click the button labelled ‘Refresh to default view’ in the bottom left corner of the page.
- Move between different pages in a dashboard: Click the buttons along the top of the dashboard, if available.
We determined the average number of people employed in each occupation per year by:
- adding together the people employed for each of the four reporting periods in a year
- dividing by 4
- rounding the final answer.
This survey reports occupations using the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations at a 4-digit level. We defined STEM-qualified occupations by identifying occupations where most workers had reported a STEM-related qualification in the 2021 Census of Population and Housing. We then classified occupations by the source of the majority of participants’ qualifications – university, vocational education and training (VET) or a combination of both.
View the ABS methodology for the Labour Force Survey.
The data on this page gives a detailed look at numbers of women and men in occupations across years, as it allows users to select one or more specific occupations. For users who would prefer:
- occupation data at a less detailed level but including diversity groups other than gender across years, see STEM-qualified occupations, by diversity group
- detailed occupation data for 2021 only, with intersecting diversity groups and state/territory splits, see Diversity in STEM insights from the 2021 Census
- workforce data for industry (rather than occupation), by gender across years, see Workforce and gender equality policies.
Read about our methodology for more information about the variety of STEM workforce data in the STEM Equity Monitor.
Data insights
In 2025, women made up around 300,000 employees in a STEM workforce of about 1.8 million people.
The number of women in STEM-qualified occupations increased by around 24,200 (9%) from 2024 to 2025. The number of men grew by around 45,700, a 3% increase.
The proportion of women in STEM-qualified occupations increased to 16% in 2025. Prior to this, in each year from 2021 to 2024, the proportion of women in STEM-qualified occupations remained at 15%. In 2005, it was 11%. In comparison, since 2005, women have consistently made up about 50% of people in non-STEM occupations and 75% of health occupations.
In the 10 years from 2015 to 2025, the number of women in STEM-qualified occupations almost doubled. The number rose from approximately 154,200 to 296,100, an increase of 92%. The number of men in STEM-qualified occupations increased by around 26% during this time, from 1,234,800 to 1,553,400.
From 2015 to 2025, the proportion of women increased from 19% to 24% in occupations where most of the workforce has university STEM qualifications. University STEM-qualified occupations include:
- actuaries, mathematicians and statisticians
- civil engineering professionals
- computer network professionals
- environmental scientists
- medical laboratory scientists.
Over the same period, the proportion of women increased from 19% to 23% in mixed STEM-qualified occupations. This grouping of STEM occupations includes air transport professionals, ICT managers and science technicians.
Occupations where most of the workforce has VET STEM qualifications, like aircraft maintenance engineers, cabinetmakers, electricians and motor mechanics, have shown extremely low gender balance over time. While the number of women in this group has grown by 13,400 (143%) from 2015 to 2025, women still made up only 3% of this group in 2025. This was a decrease from the peak of 4% in 2024.