This report offers summary results from the Sweden survey of the Cross-National, Cross-Sectional Study of Women’s Retention and Advancement in Information Technology and Engineering Careers project.

Women continue to be underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) fields. This project highlights factors that contribute to the retention and attrition rates of women working in engineering and information and communication technology (EICT) jobs across Canada, Sweden, and Germany. The primary objective of this project is to identify the impact of welfare state entitlements, job factors, and family/individual circumstances on women’s intent to stay or leave their jobs.

Our findings from the Sweden survey suggest that job-related factors such as limited permanent positions, dissatisfaction with salary, few promotion opportunities, and hostile climate are the main reasons for respondents’ job attrition. Therefore, workplaces that offer job security, good pay, and supportive peers, leaders and management can improve job retention. Improvements to welfare state entitlements for students like increased study allowance, grants, and loans, and increases to benefits for illness/injury leave and unemployment may also reduce the pressures of work-life interference. The respondents for the Sweden survey did not support increasing child-related benefits or parental leave.

Another objective of this study is to evaluate the impact and variation of these circumstances by employment sector and work type. We directly compared the experiences of women working in engineering to computer science and information technology (CSIT), as well as women working in the academic sector to the non-academic sector. We also compared Sweden-born respondents to respondents born in other countries. Our findings indicate that broadly there is greater job retention within engineering than CSIT despite CSIT respondents expressing more career satisfaction and less workplace alienation. We also find that respondents born in Sweden have more career satisfaction and less workplace alienation compared to respondents born elsewhere. These differences highlight the need to take an intersectional approach to understanding women’s working experiences within EICT in Sweden.

In the future, we will compare these results to similar surveys administered in Germany and Canada to uncover potential similarities and differences in job attrition and retention cross-nationally. Overall, the statistical analysis demonstrates that, despite increased efforts to improve gender equity across STEM fields, gender inequalities, stereotypes, and biases remain problems within EICT in Sweden, shaping women’s day to day workplace experiences across employment sectors.

We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their support and funding of this project.