Gender Equality: A Work in Progress

[planetbrilliant]

Originally Posted by mathking

It has taken us a long time to get to our current 38/34 boy to girl ratio. I think the two biggest keys for us were a strong FLL program that was getting kids involved before they got subtly pushed away and having a succession of girls who were good leaders.

Getting girls involved in STEM before they've had the chance to be pushed away is extremely important. I had the luck to go to a middle school with a halfway decent tech-ed/shop class where we got to build little cars and things like that, which definitely helped me define what I wanted in my future: to build cool stuff. My high school also offers the Women In Engineering/Intro to Engineering and Design run through PLTW which gave girls interested in STEM an all female environment to learn in. The teacher also contacted and brought in numerous female engineers to talk to us and give presentations, showing us that making a career in STEM is possible for a female.

However, I'm not sure what's going on, if they're still being pushed away from STEM, if they're changing their career goals, if they're moving away, but of my original W-IED class (already small with roughly 15 students) there's one left (myself), plus one other girl who transferred from another school. Next year there's likely going to be only one (myself), as a surprising number of students aren't taking the 4th year PLTW course.

I could talk for paragraphs upon paragraphs upon paragraphs about women in STEM and I have before, but I'm gonna stop myself here.