Women must Get their Due

by 

Nidhi George

In the modern world, we as a society rely on technology more than ever. There are more than enough jobs in the science, technology, engineering, and math industries (abbreviated as STEM) to keep women involved, but statistics prove that’s not the case. In March of 2018, only about 28% of people who work in STEM were females, while the other 72% were males. Why is this the case when 49.6% of people in the world consists of females?

In 2018, a group of 4 ten to eleven year old girls interested in STEM went to an education conference to set up a booth. They had spent months programming trick sequences to Parrot drones and Spheros, which they were performing at the expo that day. The girls used iPads to show off their codes to any interested watchers. Many of the educators and leaders who came to look at them were impressed, though there were a few who were skeptical. 

“Where are the boys who really did the work?” one man asked. Nidhi George, the student currently attending to the man, responded calmly. 

“We were the ones who did the work. We’re here to prove that girls can accomplish as much as boys in STEM,” she said.

Women and girls all around the world are facing situations like these. Most of the world’s biggest tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc.) have male CEOs. Women in the US are paid significantly less for working the same jobs, too, with the average woman getting paid only 81% of what a man would get for her job in 2018 .

On the other hand, the amount of women graduating (in the US) with STEM majors is steadily increasing. In the 2015-16 academic year, over 212,000 women graduated with STEM majors, as opposed to just over 143,000 in 2008-09 . These numbers are steadily growing, though the amount of male STEM graduates is increasing at an even faster rate. 

Now 13 years old, Nidhi George is still interested in a STEM career, and she feels that schools should encourage girls to get into STEM more. 

“I really loved that our school had an all girls coding team,” George says. This is the team mentioned above. “Now that the club isn’t running anymore, there aren’t as many opportunities for girls to explore STEM.”

Ava Prins, another young woman who is interested in STEM, also talked about her experience with STEM opportunities. 

“I feel like women are getting represented more and more in jobs relating to science and technology, They could be represented more, though,” she said. “I feel like I [as a girl] could make an impact just as well as anyone else. I think that STEM is an opportunity everyone should have.”