In promoting the government’s international women’s day STEM announcement, science minister Karen Andrews is reported as stressing that ’75 per cent of the jobs in the fastest-growing industries need STEM skills’. This is a variant on a common claim. In the same article, it also appears as 75 per cent of all occupations, as it has here, here, here, here, here and in many other places. The industries version is less common but still a regular claim, for example here, here, and here.

The original source of this 75 per cent claim has always been hard to find. Some government documents cite this 2015 PwC report. But it does not have any data supporting this number, giving this 2011 article in the Journal of STEM Education as its source. Unfortunately the article does not substantiate the claim either, other than by pointing to this 2007 US Department of Education report. But the report does not mention the 75 per cent statistic at all, and so the trail goes cold.*

Even without checking the claim’s provenance it sounds suspect. How do we define fastest? Top 10, top 20, top half? It would be easy to manipulate the list to produce the desired result. And then there is the distinction between fastest growing (as a percentage of previous levels) and greatest growth (absolute numbers of jobs). Occupations can easily have very high percentage growth rates if they start from a low base, while in absolute terms adding many fewer jobs than larger occupations growing by a smaller annual percentage. Read More »