Bruning 1

Rachel Bruning
Cynthia Mazzant
ENGL 137H
12 November 2017
Girls Get STEM, Too.

Women have always had a rightful and well-deserved place in STEM.

While this statement should not be controversial, many people might not agree with it. As
an aspiring woman in STEM, myself, I fully acknowledge that I am biased to believe that women
have always and will always play just as an important role in STEM as our male counterparts.
That being said, there is no way, regardless of your gender, to discredit the masterful work of
many women in science since the dawn of the twentieth century. Even though countless women
have played important roles in advancing the depth and breadth of our societys collective
scientific knowledge in the past century, women continue to be vastly underrepresented in STEM
(i.e. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. Even though our societal
acceptance of women in STEM has improved in the past decade, there is still a lot of work we
can and should do to ensure the gap continues to grow smaller. Its not enough to simply allow
women to participate in STEM, we need to commit ourselves as a society to encourage women
to participate in STEM.

The gender disparity in STEM fields begins as early as high school for most young
women. In a 2017 study by Microsoft, it was revealed that many girls express an interest in
STEM around age 11. By age 15 these same girls are, on average, much less likely to say they
are interested in a future STEM career. Clearly, at some point within those magical years of
 Bruning 2

adolescence, girls are exposed either to a positive environment that fosters their love and passion
for STEM or a negative environment that discourages them from pursuing their passions in more
advanced academic settings. Many of the factors that affect whether or not these young women
continue to pursue STEM in a college degree or future career path are due to the societal
attitudes that exist to tell us who is accepted in the STEM community and who is not. Luckily,
our society has moved towards being more accepting of both men and women in STEM, rather
than solely men, as it once was.

Before we can discuss what we can do to further close the gender gap in STEM fields, we
must first applaud the fact that the STEM gender gap is not nearly as wide as it once was. This is
due to a collective shift in societal attitudes about the propriety of women in the workforce and,
more importantly to our discussion here, STEM-related fields. Most of these attitudes existed
previously as a culmination of the outdated gender stereotypes enduring throughout the twentieth
century and into the early twenty-first century, specifically those in which people labeled science
and math fields as male, versus arts and humanities fields as female. These stereotypes
penetrate into nearly every aspect of the environment girls grow up in, thus affecting their
decision to pursue or not to pursue STEM in college.

Womens role in the workforce has changed since the late twentieth century to allow for
more and more women to pursue interests and activities outside the home. This has occurred as a
result of the shifting view of womens role and place in society in the past few decades from
the belief that women were meant to fall in line behind their husbands as the breadwinners of
the family to the idea that women are just as capable and deserving as men to hold positions of
power. In 1970, women comprised a mere 37.97 percent of the workforce. Nowadays, women
comprise almost half of the United States workforce. This change has made it more socially
acceptable for women to hold college degrees and work outside the home. As more women hold
wage-earning positions, there are more women to serve as mentors to other younger women,
creating a positive feedback loop system. Thus, the trend in women joining the workforce is a
positive one, as women are expected to continue dominating the labor force in the near future.

Not only does this trend exist in the general workforce, but more specifically in STEM-
related fields. The first barrier women needed to surmount was simply establishing a presence in
the workforce. The second barrier for women interested in STEM was to break down the divides
that existed between a womans ability to work in general versus a womens ability to work in
STEM fields. In the past twenty years, the number of women earning degrees in engineering, for
example, has increased. Not only that, but a 2015 study revealed that young women are more
likely to receive job offers in STEM than male candidates, given their credentials.
 Bruning 3

This shift is, once again, largely due to the growing belief that women have a legitimate
place in STEM. While it is difficult to pinpoint one exact reason for this shift, we can think of it
as a marathon, not a sprint. There is no single moment in history from which we can deduce the
ability for women to thrive in STEM fields. Rather, the shift towards women being more
accepted in STEM fields is largely due to a more internalized value of gender diversity, thus
encouraging the fact that diversity within STEM is more beneficial than a homogeneous STEM
workforce.

Even though tremendous strides have been made in the past leading up to the present,
there is still much room for improvement in the future. While, as previously mentioned, women
currently comprise almost half of the United States workforce, we still hold less than twenty-five
percent of STEM related jobs. Whats more? As the number of women earning college degrees
and entering the workforce has definitively increased in the past decade, women continue to earn
a disproportionately small number of undergraduate degrees in STEM fields when compared to
men. The fact of the matter is that while men and women have steadily increased their share of
STEM undergraduate degrees in the past decade, women consistently fall behind men in nearly
every degree program offered in the STEM fields. This is where our problem lies; not in the fact
that women arent pursuing STEM (because we know they are in ever-increasing numbers) but
rather that there still exists a quiet, underlying bias against women in STEM.
 Bruning 4

So, now that we have hurdled the first two barriers to women pursuing STEM, we must
tackle our third the fact that even though women have become increasingly prevalent stewards
of STEM, men still dominate the field. We are inching closer in the marathon that is achieving
gender equality in STEM, but we have to go back to basics in order to address these underlying
problems. What basics are we talking about here? Well, the way in which we can further advance
women in STEM-related fields in the future is to not simply allow women a place at the table
that is STEM, but rather encourage girls from a young age that they are accepted in the STEM
community and that they can and should pursue studies in STEM fields. There are multiple ways
in which this can occur, including creating a more inclusive STEM classroom and providing
mentors and role models to young girls in STEM to further address the inherent bias against girls
in STEM before university.

When I was in seventh grade, I was invited to attend a conference called FIST, Females
in Science and Technology. This conference was specifically designed to engage middle school
aged girls in STEM studies, providing us with valuable resources to encourage our passion for
STEM and help us develop the skills necessary to pursue those passions in our future endeavors.
The conference was held at a local high school and hundreds of female students my age attended.
Together, we spent that day immersed in a captivating world that showcased the very best a
 Bruning 5

STEM education had to offer. From building robots together to studying ecology in the schools
greenhouse, we left the conference resolute in our belief that we could conquer the STEM field,
no matter the fact that we were only eleven-year-old girls.

During the conference, we were also introduced to several accomplished women in

STEM fields, and we listened in awe as they discussed their own paths to discovering and
pursuing their personal passions in STEM. In their stories, I recognized myself. Believe it or not,
these women comprised just a fraction of the mentors and role models I had as a young girl.
These mentors collectively encouraged my love of science from a young age, and always gave
me the tools and resources I needed to pursue that love in whatever way I chose. Ultimately, the
doors they opened for me paved the way for myself to attend Penn State and pursue a degree and
eventual career in STEM.

While I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment that curated my passion for
STEM and enabled me to grow from an eleven-year-old girl who simply loved science to an
eighteen-year-old young woman pursuing a double major Bachelor of Science degree, many girls
are not surrounded by such an encouraging environment. It is necessary that we address this.
Mentoring programs are critical pathways to success for anyone in academics, no matter their
age nor prestige.

It is necessary that both primary education and upper education institutions commit
themselves to providing girls with mentorship in STEM. The most crucial period of time for this
impact to occur is when girls are in middle school and high school. Without mentorship
programs, it is more likely that girls will drop out of or lose interest in STEM fields. That is
exactly why Microsoft has launched a campaign, #MakeWhatsNext, to encourage young women
to pursue STEM. The more exposure girls have to STEM, the more likely they are to see other
women in STEM who they can look up to, and ultimately the more likely they are to pursue
STEM.

One clear response to the need for more female role models in STEM is to provide these
role models in early education, through the inclusivity of a diverse classroom. There is no data
that supports the idea that girls simply arent interested in science or math or that girls cant do
science or math. Rather, it is necessary we quell the inherent biases that may persist in
elementary, middle, and high school classrooms that cause girls to falsely believe that they cant
do science or math.

Multiple studies have revealed that girls who have been discouraged by classroom
teachers in elementary school were much less likely than boys to take advanced STEM courses
in high school. These courses, already under representative of female students, are necessary and
critical pathways to girls pursuing and succeeding in STEM in college. While the collective
societal shift in attitude towards being more accepting of women in STEM persists not only at
the collegiate level of academia, but also at the primary education level of academia, almost a
quarter of teachers are still not entirely confident that STEM opportunities existed for girls.

As such, it is necessary that the shift in attitude towards being more gender inclusive and
supportive of gender diversity in STEM fields permeates into real and true change. Even though
 Bruning 6

we have accomplished a lot in helping secure a future for women in STEM, the race is not yet
over and doubt still exists in whether or not true gender equality in STEM is entirely plausible. If
you ask me, the future is bright for young women in STEM. But it is still important that all
women in STEM, whether you are a schoolteacher, a professor, a researcher, an ally of women in
STEM, or even an undergraduate like myself, encourage the next generation of young girls in
STEM that it is possible and entirely plausible that we can close the gender gap in STEM fields.
The more we offer resources, mentorships, and opportunities to young girls in STEM, the more
of those young girls will go on to become the next generation of strong and capable female
scientists, engineers, mathematicians, inventors, and dreamers of our world.

All because we had the audacity to believe that girls have a rightful and well-deserved
place in STEM.