'Talented Women for a Successful Wales'

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House – in the Senedd at 3:01 pm on 16 May 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:01, 16 May 2018

No, I couldn't agree more with that. This is about parents, not mothers, as we keep saying. I chair the board that implements the report, the women in STEM board, and there've been two meetings so far. At the last meeting we broadened the membership of the board, particularly with a view to bringing in more than academia and public services, and to include a range of other people as well. As you rightly said, I accepted all the recommendations from the report and did a written statement to the Assembly to that effect.

The Cabinet Secretary for Education provided a progress update to the board at its last meeting on actions taken within the education sector to implement the recommendations. We recently wrote to all Welsh universities requesting a further update from the one that they gave us in September, at the first meeting of the board. We've also written to all anchor companies and key business networks to request feedback on their progress with the 12 recommendations from the report. We're following that up at the moment. And we have a cross-departmental working group of officials leading the co-ordination and implementation of the recommendations directed at the Welsh Government itself—although there weren't that many for the Welsh Government itself—to support and facilitate those by outside organisations.

My colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport has written this into the new economic contract as well, and we're also working on the fair work criteria, which will also have that. One last thing to mention to you is that we also have our Sêr Cymru programme, which we're very proud of indeed, one of which is specifically aimed at returners to STEM—returners into the academic world, but for STEM. And you'll be amazed to discover that, of course, about 98 per cent of those have been women going back into it. So, that's particularly aimed at returners, and we're looking to see how we can roll that successful programme out in other areas of economic activity, such as our big anchor companies.