Universities in the United States are going to great lengths to prove that their engineering courses are female-friendly. The University of Wyoming recently held an event called Women in STEM, that saw 500 young women from grades 7 to 12 interact with fields that in recent history have been overrun by men. The event is one of many events that have been held across the United States to attempt to further convince young women that a career in a STEM field would be beneficial to their futures.
“Women are still under-represented in the science and engineering fields, and we want to give young women information about career opportunities and college majors in these fields and expose them to all the opportunities out there in terms of science and engineering,” said Shawna Mcbride, an associate director of the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium, speaking to Wyoming Business Report.
Notably, professors of electrical and computer engineering held workshops for the girls, showing off robotics and Raspberry Pis, things that would hopefully pique their interest.
The University of California has also tried to bring young adult women into engineering by hosting a week-long summer camp called The UC Berkeley Girls in Engineering Week that explored the different kinds of engineering that exist in the world. The girls seemed to enjoy the biomedical engineering workshop, the robotics displays, civil engineering workshops and the software development workshops. All of the instructors at the event were women, which inspired confidence in the girls seeing as though they could see that some women do thrive in the engineering industry.
Shocking statistics
An Ohio State University study has investigated how much females who have obtained P.h.Ds earn one year after graduation. The results showed that women earn 31 percent less. The results were published in Science Daily under the title Young women in STEM fields earn up to one-third less than men.
Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor economics at Ohio State said: “There’s a dramatic difference in how much early career men and women in the sciences are paid. We can’t get a sense of some of the reasons behind the pay gap, but our study can’t speak to whether or any of the gap is due to discrimination. Our results do suggest some lack of family-friendliness for women in these careers.”
The data has confused the authors due to inconceivable reasons as to why women are earning less than men in STEM fields. The data was compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau with help from the American Institutes for Research. It is concrete evidence that women are earning less in STEM fields. The STEM career compensation data has been recently unavailable however 150 institutions will hopefully be publishing their data soon. Only 16 universities have provided data for researchers to comb over that have produced the above-mentioned results.
