Showing Girls the Way Through the STEM Pipeline
Girls are at the highest risk of losing interest in STEM career paths between the ages of 13 and 17. Giving them real STEM work early in life helps keep them on track.
A postdoctoral fellow and her research assistant huddled in deep consultation one evening this March in Manhattan’s New York University Langone Medical Center. The two were planning how to best present their research on technology and sleep disorders at an upcoming conference in San Diego.
“In a perfect world, you think about an arc of scientific discovery in our work,” Rebecca Robbins, a PhD specialist in sleep disorders, explained to her assistant. “You collect data, analyze, write it up and submit to a conference before a journal. The idea is to bring your idea, your science, to the field.”
In this instance, Robbins was referring to the study she and her young partner had conducted on people who use mobile health technologies like the Fitbit watch. Their research focused on the way apps such as Up, a social app for tracking diet, exercise, sleep, and cardio health, affect users’ sleep and beliefs.
Robbins had just landed admission to a highly competitive health communication conference in California. “It’s part of the peer review process,” Robbins reminded the assistant, Melissa Chen.
“Would your mom be willing to come?” she asked
“I hope so,” said Chen, frowning.
Chen is 17-years-old and still in high school. She won’t be able to go without her mom. Chen has collected college credits as well as invaluable experience, working side by side with Robbins for nearly a year as they track data on sleep quality. Robbins helped Melissa construct a poster of their findings and coached her in how to field questions on the ground.
“Melissa stands to gain a huge amount if she can go,” said Robbins. “She will be able to network with senior scholars, and she will have to think on her toes to justify the choices she made in her scientific project.”
Chen is part of an advanced college-level research curriculum designed by SUNY Albany in science, technology, engineering and math. She attends World Journalism Preparatory School, a public school in Flushing Queens for sixth through twelfth graders, and is one of only three students in the Franklin Center Program’s first graduating class of 20 to secure a coveted mentor in the field, in this case, Robbins.
“This is unheard of to have this on your CV as a high school student,” said Robbins. “She’s a real dynamo.”
The opportunity for professional hands-on experience in science is often the key missing link for female students. Women currently make up half of the total U.S. college-educated workforce, but only 29 percent of the science and engineering workforce. STEM education represents a vital opportunity for young women — a group at the highest risk of losing interest in STEM career paths between the ages of 13 and 17.
Change the Equation, a coalition for the promotion of STEM literacy, predicts a 17 percent growth in STEM jobs between 2014 and 2024, and the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer specialist job openings. STEM also represents an important strategy for closing the gender pay gap — the median hourly wage for STEM jobs is double that of the average US job. But the percentage of female computer science graduates has actually decreased from 37 percent in 1984 to 18 percent today.
Opinions vary about when the disparity begins. In the past 20 years, female high school students have increased the number of math and science credits they take to match their male counterparts. But by the time they get to college, only about 19 percent of female freshman say they would like to pursue a STEM field, compared to about 35 percent of college men.
Part of the problem is the lack of access to STEM opportunities beyond a daily high school science class. Some experts say that boys have more informal opportunities outside of school to explore science. And too often girls who do connect with extra STEM opportunities see them as a hobby rather than as a viable career path.
Mark Baribault, the director of the Franklin Center Program at World Journalism Prep, offers his 9th through 12th graders an intense STEM research and science-writing curriculum that culminates for some with fieldwork mentored by Ph.D. students, and is rewarded with college credit for seniors.
The program is only in its fourth year at the high school. Many students drop out, balking at the 8 to 25 peer-reviewed research papers they must read per week and the extended school hours required. As his students begin the search for their area of concentration, Baribault tells them to find a topic they are so passionate about that they won’t mind staying up all night reading research on it. But for the female students who stick it out and secure mentors, the increased sense of possibility is palpable.
Chen assists Robbins with data entry and analysis and summarizes content for conferences. She is also conducting an independent study under Robbins’s direction on exploring the effect of sleep hygiene, duration and drowsiness on subway operators, bus drivers and other transportation shift workers whose work days do not follow a traditional 9 to 5 schedule.
“It can be so powerful to sit down at the table with bright, young people from interdisciplinary backgrounds, we urgently need them as scientists,” said Robbins, noting that Chen’s training in journalism brings unique dynamism to her work. Robbins said mentorship is critical to building young scientists, crediting her own successes in part to encouragement from strong professional role models, but that level of support is not as common in the field as it needs to be.
“There’s not always an incentive to mentor young scientists through the pipeline. Time is always of the essence in science. The work is intensive, you teach, you write for publications.” This may explain some of the difficulty in convincing young women to pursue STEM careers.
But a 2016 study at the University of Illinois found that the “brilliance = male” stereotype develops at a far younger age and fairly equally regardless of socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity. Something happens to American children between the ages of 5 and 7, by which time they embrace a cultural assumption that “high-level cognitive ability (brilliance, genius, giftedness) is present more often in men than in women.” At age 5, the study said, boys and girls associated brilliance with their own gender to a similar extent, but by ages 6 and 7, the girls were significantly less likely than boys to associate brilliance with their own gender.
Researchers concluded in Science Magazine “this stereotype begins to shape children’s interests as soon as it is acquired and is thus likely to narrow the range of careers they will one day contemplate.”
Other research suggests that another issue may lie in the difference between how American boys and girls are taught to handle both ambition and disappointment. “Science is mostly failure, and these days also more salesmanship,” said Jessica Gray, a research fellow in systems biology at Harvard Medical School. “Boys are praised even when they don’t succeed, so failure doesn’t register. They are also raised to be better at self promotion.”
Baribault said he makes it a point in his teaching to address what he calls “the continuing issue of marginalizing females as they enter the research world.”
It was the unique experience of seeing women front and center in the labs at Barnard College that inspired World Journalism Prep junior Yasmine Mohamed to secure her own mentor there. Mohamed estimated that she had sent 300 emails to scientists at universities across the country before landing a meeting with Jonathan Snow, an assistant professor of biological sciences who studies cellular stress responses of the honeybee. She knew Barnard empowers women, but when she visited for her interview, what she saw had a profound impact. “There were no men anywhere,” she said looking into the labs. “I thought, ‘Wow, I can do this.’”
Snow agreed to mentor Mohamed, and she is expected to start work on Colony Collapse Disorder in honeybees at Barnard this summer. “I always thought scientists have a big role in life, I wanted to have a purpose,” said Mohamed, but she had never seen a STEM career as a real option.
Though she said she will probably study journalism in college, she is interested in science writing and said of the STEM program, “It’s empowered me not to cross these options out. I have a lot of routes I can take.”
Likewise, Chen credits all her science reading over the past four years with improving her vocabulary and raising her SAT scores, helping her gain admission to Rutgers, Baruch, Pace, Hunter and her first choice Stony Brook University so far. She plans to study science in college. Chen and her mentor, Robbins, have discussed what it would take for her to get to med school. The difference may lie in the opportunity Chen has had to build relationships with role models she can observe at work in their labs.
Robbins added that her own mentor challenges other women in the field “to be ‘the change we want to see,’ meaning it’s natural to compete against each other, but supporting other women at work is key to advancing all of us.”
Chen said the best advice she has received from Robbins so far is to “always say yes to opportunities. She said any experience can only help my future.”
