Multinational enterprises and gender equity in STEM

Multinational Enterprises (MEs) are de facto promoters of corporate agendas across the world, and share their corporate cultures across borders and communities. Furthermore, MEs are some of the largest employers of technical graduates and, thereby, influence educational trends. As global leaders in the employment of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) graduates, MEs can also play an influential role towards gender equity in STEM employment and education. However, in engineering and the physical sciences particularly, women enroll in bachelor's programs in fewer numbers, and drop out of the workforce at higher rates than men. In addition, women practically disappear towards the higher levels of corporate structures and are rendered nearly invisible at the pinnacle of the corporate hierarchy. This paper, therefore, lays out a theoretical framework for investigating the relationship between formal ME gender equity programs and the resultant gender equity in STEM employment and STEM education. The goal of the paper is to recommend specific actions to be taken by ME practitioners to retain women employees throughout corporate structures. MEs with dynamic recruitment strategies, formalized retention tactics, sponsorship goals, and active community engagement with educational institutions ideally promote more diverse work environments and will show improved gender equity in their employment statistics. This baseline study highlights the role of MEs as champions of gender equity and, by extension, their championship of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The specific SDGs addressed by this study are goals 5 and 8, Gender Equality and Decent Work and Economic growth.