By Bridget Balch
Houston Chronicle
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) In an effort to bring more balance to gender representation, schools and a number of education-focused organizations across the nation have used research to develop strategies to engage young girls in STEM, particularly in the preteen years, when girls tend to move away from STEM.
Houston Chronicle
When Romeesa Khan signed up to take a computer science class her freshman year at Terry High School in Rosenberg, she was the only girl in the class.
Khan had always been fascinated by science, straying from her older sister’s inclination toward the arts.
She decorated her childhood bedroom with NASA paraphernalia and watched Animal Planet after school.
It wasn’t until she was older that she realized the discrepancy in the numbers of boys and girls in her science and technology camps and classes.
“It was kind of troubling seeing there weren’t as many females,” Khan said.
Khan’s observation is reflective of nationwide figures that show that women are statistically underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.
While women made up about half of the U.S. college-educated workforce in 2013, only 29 percent of the science and engineering workforce was female, according to the National Science Foundation.
It’s a trend that appears to be shifting as educators place more of an emphasis on encouraging girls to pursue an interest in STEM courses.
Of the 30 valedictorians and salutatorians who graduated from Fort Bend County’s two largest school districts this year, nearly two-thirds of them were young women intending to pursue a career in a STEM field — including Khan.
In an effort to bring more balance to gender representation, schools and a number of education-focused organizations across the nation have used research to develop strategies to engage young girls in STEM, particularly in the preteen years, when girls tend to move away from STEM.
Lamar CISD began its efforts three years ago.
“We intentionally and very explicitly began to design different types of experiences,” said Valerie Vogt, Lamar CISD’s chief academic officer. “One of the charges of the public school system is to make sure our students are workforce ready, and that means both genders.”
The district’s main program to give middle school girls a push in the STEM direction is STEAM camp — a girls-only academic summer camp that teaches skills in math, science and computer technology with hands-on projects. In the three years since it started, enrollment has jumped from 16 to 120.
Vogt believes the key to achieving a more equal STEM workforce is as simple as giving young girls a taste of STEM learning in a supportive and exciting environment.
“They take it from there,” Vogt said. “They fall in love with it.”
For Khan, no push was necessary to make her fall in love with science.
“Science and math were always my stronger subjects,” said Khan who was the valedictorian for Lamar CISD’s Terry High School this year.
She asked her parents to send her to science and technology summer camps and intentionally pursued science and math advanced placement classes in high school — even if it meant staying up until 2 a.m. each night working on homework, only to wake up at 5 a.m. the next day for before-school meetings.
Khan plans to double major in chemical engineering and biochemistry and intends to pursue a career as either a chemical engineer or a neurologist.
Jade Kanemitsu, the salutatorian for Foster High School in Richmond, never felt that she needed additional encouragement to pursue an interest in science either.
“I’ve always been interested in biology,” said Kanemitsu, who plans to study biology and statistics at Rice University.
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“I definitely just went for it.”
Kanemitsu noticed a growing female presence in her school’s Workforce Industry and Technology Club, although she said that the club membership was still predominantly male.
Adrian Vela, the only male to achieve one of the top two GPAs at a Lamar CISD high school this year, said that the increase in young women pursuing science studies wasn’t surprising.
He took as many advanced science classes as he could, and by his count, the girls outnumbered the guys in those classes.
“I think women, especially in my school definitely take school more seriously,” said Vela, who plans to study economics, history and environmental science at Duke University.
For Vogt, the mission to encourage young female students is a personal one.
“I was not raised in an era when girls were encouraged to be part of these fields,” Vogt said. “It’s amazing to see what students can do if they just have the system behind them and teachers behind them to give them the opportunity to really shine.”
