Policy and business leaders have used a major food conference to highlight the need for more women in the global agriculture sector. One of the speakers, Chelsea Clinton, told delegates that women were a "crucial, vital and necessary" part of delivering global food security. Data shows that progress has been made in recent years, but there is still a long way to go to close the gender gap, BBC reported. The call for equality was made at the 2015 Borlaug Dialogue in the US. "Certainly, we are not on track at the moment to feed the population we expect to have around the world in 2050," Clinton, vice-president of the Clinton Foundation, told the gathering. One of the themes of the three-day event, which focused on the "fundamentals of global food security", was inspiring young women to take up careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem). Another speaker, Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, director of the Kenya-based African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (Award), outlined some of the challenges. "We need to increase the number of women scientists but first of all we need to create a conducive environment in which they work. It is as much about institutional transformation as it is about investing in individuals," she said. "It can be a little too easy to pretend that this is only an African problem, hence a cultural problem. But that is not true; we have got the same challenge in the UK, across Europe and in the US. "It is a global problem so we have to change the global culture surrounding science and who can be a scientist." A report produced by the Campaign for Science and Engineering (Case) that examined diversity in UK Stem said that just nine percent of those involved in non-medical Stem posts were women. However, it also highlighted that the problems facing the science sector in the UK went beyond gender equality. The authors reported that there was an annual shortfall of 40,000 skilled Stem workers.

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