By Yunseo Lee, Year 12
Until surprisingly recently, women were largely barred from pursuing academics. Society’s doubts about their intelligence and capabilities kept many women confined to domestic work such as housekeeping and the upbringing of children. Although many legislative and systemic changes have been made in recent years for women’s education, a closer look at the fabrics of our society still unveils clearly tangible gender disparities in higher education and later careers.
The issue is most prominent in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The recent Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics, Anne L’Huiller, is only one of five women who have received the prize, out of the 224 total laureates to date. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, women only made up 1 to 3% of the student body in the 1950s, and its first female graduate worked without pay at the university. Last year, in Switzerland, only 30.5% of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Bachelor level students were women, with a mere 2.5% increase from more than a decade ago. Furthermore, less than a third of STEM graduates worldwide are women, and in Switzerland, the number plummets to 22%. Here in the canton of Geneva, only 12% of all Swiss Matura Diploma students go on to study a STEM subject. The number of female students declines even more in engineering and information science, with only 8.9% of Swiss women with a STEM Bachelor’s degree working in engineering, compared to 20.9% of men.
So what exactly is the reason for these disparities? It is not that women are not interested in STEM. A recent study done by Microsoft on 6,000 U.S. girls and women found that a staggering 52% of all interviewed middle school students and 48% of high school students “feel powerful doing STEM.” It isn’t that they lack information about how to pursue STEM fields, either. An even larger 56% and 63% of middle and high school girls responded that they know how to pursue a STEM career. Then what is the problem?
It is that although horizons in women’s education have indeed been massively expanded, there is more to encouraging women to study STEM than just systematic approaches. Cultural values and attitudes embedded deep within societies significantly hinder young women’s STEM pursuits. Microsoft’s study, for instance, showed that young girls’ interest in STEM falls as they grow older due to a range of reasons from “peer pressure and a lack of role models and support from parents as well as teachers, to a general misconception of what STEM careers look like in the real world.”
These statistics and sentiments can be found reflected in our own learning environments at LGB. In the Secondary School, the number of male and female STEM teachers are fairly balanced as a whole, but engineering and technology subjects are mainly taught by male teachers. This inevitably has an impact on LGB’s future female engineers as they struggle to find a personal link between their teachers as role models and their underrepresented identity in STEM. Female STEM teachers in these departments will help strengthen the female students’ belief that STEM is a field that they can succeed in, as well as their will to continue pursuing their passions.
Additionally, as LGB students progress through the Secondary years, less and less female students continue studying STEM subjects, especially physics and computer science. Although the number of male and female students and teachers in biology and chemistry are much less skewed, the overwhelming majority in physics and computer science at LGB seem to be males. Diya Doda, a Year 12 student, says that only 2 out of the 17 students in her IB Physics class are girls. She also adds that her computer science class last year only contained 3 female students, and that even fewer are taking it at IB level this year. Diya further comments that “it’s hard to find girls with similar interests to [hers]” and “it makes [her] feel a bit disconnected from her girl friends sometimes.” It also has a direct impact on her learning environments, making her nervous to speak up in class at times and feel pressured to do better to represent women in a male-dominated field. She speculates that the way girls and boys are brought up as children influences their learning opportunities and experiences with STEM subjects later on in life, as she finds that, growing up, her male friends have had a lot more exposure to building things and trying things for themselves in engineering and science.
So what can LGB as a school do to help resolve this problem? We must start with small changes in our learning environments, fostering positive attitudes toward girls in STEM and making opportunities for them to explore and interact with various STEM subjects. Inviting more female guest speakers from many different STEM occupations as well as learning more about female scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in STEM classes will inspire and encourage girls who are interested in STEM. Building a close network of female STEM students through clubs and after school activities would be another way to support them in their academic journeys.
Thankfully, there is already an effort at LGB to decrease gender imbalance in STEM. Women in STEAM, a student-led club, aims to support and encourage girls pursuing careers or studies in science, technology, engineering, art, or mathematics within and beyond our school community. An ongoing project is a fundraising campaign for a girl in Sierra Leone who wants to be the first cardiothoracic surgeon in her region. Over the past few school years, WinSTEAM members have been organising bake sales to fund Khadijatu’s medical school fees. This year, at the upcoming Winter Market, Year 12 students are setting up a WinSTEAM stall for small science workshops and baked goods to raise more money. Fortunately, Khadijatu’s project is planned to come to a successful close within this school year and new projects are being initiated, including a middle school science fair to nurture young girls’ interest in STEM. The club’s 30 members meet on Fridays in SA110 at morning break, and anyone is welcome to join to make a difference for LGB’s women in STEM!
For more information regarding WinSTEAM, please contact winsteam.lgb@gmail.com.
Source: https://swe.org/research/2023/employment/,https://innovation.mit.edu/women-at-mit/,https://www.epfl.ch/gender_monitoring,https://kof.ethz.ch/en/bulletin/Proportion-of-women-in-STEM-subjects.html,https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/how-can-we-build-a-better-balance-of-women-in-stem/,https://news.microsoft.com/features/why-do-girls-lose-interest-in-stem
