Over the next decade, the UK’s economic landscape is expected to experience drastic changes. Fossil fuel industries are expected to decline and green jobs are expected to rise, while other existing sectors such as manufacturing will be completely reshaped. 

The growing availability of green jobs presents a profound opportunity for much of the UK’s workforce. However, in the move towards a green economy, it is vital that women are not left behind. Therefore, in this project, we wanted to understand the challenges that qualified individuals encounter when entering the green labour market, emphasising the barriers that disproportionately affect women, thereby establishing an important link between economic changes and gender equality.

If we can identify the factors that make green jobs and skills less appealing to women, then we and others can design solutions to tackle this and avoid biases being built into the emerging green labour market.

Previous research by Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has unveiled a concerning trend: women show less interest than men in developing green skills. This finding is accompanied by projections from the Boston Consulting Group, which anticipates that women will occupy only 25% of green jobs by the year 2030.

This disparity is at least partly linked to the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields, foundational for a vast array of green jobs. Intriguingly, further qualitative work has shown that even women with STEM qualifications either lack awareness of opportunities in the green sector or perceive themselves as unqualified for these roles.

To gain a better understanding of the barriers preventing women from participating in the green labour market, we will launch a comprehensive survey across the UK. Our aim is to examine gender-based differences in perceptions regarding green jobs and to identify specific obstacles preventing people from entering distinct green roles. Insights from this survey will help prioritise solutions and tailor interventions for different sectors, acknowledging that barriers can vary not only by gender but also by the nature of the job.

We will conduct a UK-wide survey with approximately 2400 participants to understand the barriers preventing both qualified men and women from pursuing six distinct green jobs. These jobs span a range of sectors as well as educational and professional backgrounds.

While the survey will touch upon participants' general awareness of and interest in green jobs more broadly, our primary focus will be on their perceptions and understanding of a specific green job. Each participant will be presented with either a STEM job (eg, renewable energy engineer) or a non-STEM job (eg, environmental consultant), depending on their educational and professional background. We will then evaluate how informed participants are about this job and its prerequisites, their overall impressions of it, and their self-assessed likelihood of pursuing such a career path. Finally, participants’ open-ended responses will also be analysed, revealing a broader range of factors discouraging or motivating individuals to pursue the green job they have been assigned to in the survey.