Growing up, my dream job changed relatively quickly – as per usual for little girls. You name the occupation, and I’ve probably wanted to pursue it: an orthodontist, an artist, a professional cupcake baker, National Geographic photographer – the list goes on and on. There was even a point when I thought it would be a good idea to be a DJ who only played Taylor Swift songs. Yet there has never been a moment in my life where I wanted to be an engineer or a mathematician.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t little girls around the world who want to do just that. There are girls who would love nothing more than to wear a lab coat and work with numbers all day long. And more often than not, they have influential adults in their lives who unintentionally discourage them from this ambition.
A 2014 statistic from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women make up 47 percent of the total U.S. workforce, but the numbers are much lower in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. They comprise 39 percent of chemists and material scientists, 28 percent of environmental scientists and geoscientists, 16 percent of chemical engineers and only 12 percent of civil engineers.
Laboratories and colleges have been trying to fix this problem by specifically reaching out to females. We even have students here at Hastings High who attend Code Crush at the University of Nebraska – Omaha each year. Even so, there is much more work to be done at the grassroots level of every girl’s life.
“Okay,” you say, “girls just don’t like those subjects, so they don’t want to pursue a career relating to them.” But if that were completely true, the following statistic would be inexplicable.
According to the National Science Foundation, 66 percent of 4th-grade girls say they like science and math, but only 18 percent of all college engineering majors are female. Many different people have developed many different explanations for this sad yet true analysis. However, the most hard-hitting interpretation comes from the fact that young girls are expected by adults to conform to societal molds set out for them.
You’ve heard the horrors of feminists time and time again. We are “radical” and “unnecessary”. You’re sick of it, and quite frankly, society as a whole is tired of hearing women rant about gender inequality.
But the statistics are unavoidable. We need to begin perpetuating an environment for young girls to feel confident and comfortable when it comes to STEM. And it can happen right here at HHS.
A commonplace trend in elementary school is to encourage girls to go into fields relating to the arts and boys to go into STEM. And the trend isn’t necessarily wrong; teachers and parents see the gender gap and try to cater to what their daughter should, statistically speaking, enjoy. But this trend has found its way into the classrooms and homes of teenagers, college students, and more noticeably – the workforce.
The often unintentional stereotypes we entrench into our children at an early age tend to strengthen as they grow older and explore the society that has established and continues to reinforce these stereotypes.
So why is it so important to have women in STEM fields, anyway? Why should I encourage little girls to take interest in science and math? Does it honestly matter?
Yes. When we have a shortage of roughly half of the world’s population in science, we are missing roughly half of the population’s interpretation of science. This means that because men and women are different in inherent ways, having studies conducted mostly by men manifests results mostly accommodating to men.
A study from the Journal of Women’s Health found that women made up less than one-quarter of all patients enrolled in 46 examined clinical trials completed in 2004. And although more women than men die from heart disease each year, a 2008 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reported that women represented only 10 percent to 47 percent of each subject pool in 19 heart-related trials.
For a long time, the attitude seemed to be that except for reproductive organs, women were basically smaller versions of men. This led to doctors performing the same treatments and prescribing the same medications to women as they did for men. However, the outcomes were often different for the genders.
For example, just a few years ago, the Food and Drug Administration reduced recommended doses of Ambien for women by half, because women take longer than men to metabolize the sleeping pill and were waking up and doing daily activities with the drug still in their systems. Â
But as more women begin to enter the science field, more accidental assumptions of health related to women are discovered. For the sake of women’s health, we need to encourage young girls to take an interest in STEM that they can pursue throughout school and their careers.
As individuals, we can’t change the gender gap within STEM. We can’t change the way society portrays nerds, or doctors, or scientists, or even calculus teachers. Collectively, though, we can give girls and women alike a platform for discussion and let them know that the world really needs them.
