It’s a source of consternation from the White House to your local school house: how to get more young women to pursue college degrees and careers in the male-dominated STEM fields, meaning science, technology, engineering, and math.
A provocative ad made by Microsoft says seven out of ten girls are interested in science, but the number who stick with it and get jobs in STEM dwindles to only two out of ten.
“A lot of that is that these fields are traditionally fields in which men have been the primary players,” explains Dr. Zahra Hazari, a professor at FIU’s STEM Transformation Institute.
She’s an expert on getting women interested in science careers, and says stereotypes, such as only boys are good at math, and engineering and computer programming are jobs for men, are hard to overcome.
Gulliver Academy saw that those stereotypes have a real impact and acted in a unique way, creating a girls-only engineering class five years ago. It’s been a huge success, drawing so many seventh and eighth grade girls, the school will open two more sections of the class next school year.
“I think it does empower girls and it gives them the confidence they need,” said Yolanda Valencia, the science teacher behind the effort. “And a lot of them don’t know what engineering is and what you can do with it so we’re exposing them to computer coding, robot design, and they’re developing skills and having fun with it.”
Dr. Hazari says programs like the one at Gulliver can change the paradigm by letting girls flourish and express themselves without the pressure of boys criticizing them.
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“They feel more confident sharing their ideas because there isn’t that social, judgmental pressure, and sometimes boys dominate the class,” Dr. Hazari said.
8th grader Rachel Kaiser says the girls-only class has made her and her classmates as good as the boys.
“Maybe even better because we think differently than the guys do, the girls just work more together than the boys,” Rachel said, “and with girls, you’re not as intimidated by all the boys because the boys sometimes made fun of the girls.”
The national statistics are discouraging. According to one study, the number of computing jobs held by women in the United States has actually gone down, from 35% in 1990 to 26% in 2013.
Conversely, the number of women in biological sciences, like medicine, has grown to more than half of all jobs. Dr. Hazari says that’s because medicine has an obvious altruism, which attracts women.
“This is why we see so many more women in biology than we do in physics, right, because the social relevance is clear right off the bat,” Dr. Hazari said, and points out that the benefits to society of physical sciences must be brought to the forefront in order to draw more women to those fields.
She says that’s what they’re doing at FIU, and while only 20% of physics graduates nationally are women, at FIU, that number is 30%.
