Illustrations by Gaurab Thakali

When India’s Mars mission entered the planet’s orbit in 2014, the control room was crowded with triumphant faces – yet the story that captured the world’s attention wasn’t about a successful, highly technical mission, but rather the number of women involved on the project. Images of the programme’s many women scientists celebrating the achievement went viral – helping to shake off stereotypes of ‘women’s work’ and inspiring thousands of girls to dream of joining the exploration of space.

That so many women have an integral role in a space programme shouldn’t be that striking. Over the past year, a record 100 women were voted into the US Congress, women began to out number men at medical and business schools, and they’re starting businesses at a faster rate than men. But, despite a few high-profile examples, there is still a sizeable gap when it comes to career equality.

To detail all of the ways in which women are under-represented in key industries would take more pages than this magazine has, but in the spirit of brevity, some key statistics: companies with women CEOs only got 3% of venture capital funding between 2011 and 2013, according to research by the Diana Project. In 2012, women accounted for 49% of the bottom 99% of earners in the US; but for just 11% of the top 1%, according to a report compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Since 1901, 575 men have received a Nobel Prize in science, compared with only 17 women. Women make up only 3% of creative directors in advertising, take up only 4% of engineering apprenticeships, and only 1% of UK jobs in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are held by women – the lowest proportion in Europe.

The huge inequality in these important, innovative and lucrative industries could be preventing many women from having a stake in the future economy, and it’s largely down to old-fashioned sexism, according to Anna Beninger, research director of equality campaigning organisation Catalyst. “Tech-intensive industries have a very poor reputation for supporting gender diversity,” she says.

“The image of ‘brogrammer’ culture reigns in technology,and the old boys’ club in oil and gas companies. And it turns out that this reputation is well-deserved, as we saw recently with the release of workforce statistics from top technology firms including Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple.” Each of these companies’ self-reported gender balance is around 30% female to 70% male, but the proportion of women in the technological heart of some of these businesses drops to as little as 10%.