WOMEN IN THE WORLD
December 2016
According to the
National Science
Foundation,
women make up
15% of
engineers.
Debbie Sterling
created
GoldieBlox in
order to introduce
young girls to the
subject.
Photo courtesy of
Forbes
LEARNING TO HAVE A VOICE
What Women Face in STEM
BY KRISTIN SNYDER
When Mrs. Maggie Duerr, math teacher,
entered college, she had no plans to do anything
related to math. As a high school student, the
subject had not been her strong suit, so she
planned on taking her life in a different direction.
technology, engineering, and mathematics), and
the effects of this can best be seen in the number
of women in various STEM careers.
According to the National Science Foundation, a
government agency meant to support research
and education in STEM fields, social sciences are
62% female and life sciences are 48% female.
Women only make up 15% of the engineering
field and 25% of computer and mathematical
sciences.
That all changed when one of her professors
stated that girls were not good enough at math to
major in the subject. Irritated, Duerr ended up
changing her major to the one that she had been
told women could not succeed at. “I wanted to
prove him wrong, which I did, and I ended up
liking it,” Duerr said.
After discovering her interest in the subject,
Duerr came out on top. Duerr said, “It felt like
there was a little barrier there. That felt good to
break through.”
When broken down, those numbers become a bit
more disturbing. Women make up 35.2% of
chemists, 22.7% of chemical engineers, 11.1% of
physicists and astronomers, 10.7% of electrical or
computer hardware engineers, and 7.9% of
mechanical engineers are women.
Unfortunately, this scenario is not uncommon,
and there remain many barriers for women to
break. While people nowadays typically would
not brazenly state that girls can’t do math,
women have consistently been underestimated
when it comes to performing in STEM (science,
There are multiple causes to these low numbers,
many of which stem from early education.
According to Education Week Teacher, teachers
assume that their male students are better at
math than their female students; this assumption
can form as early as kindergarten. The
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