What Young Women Interested in STEM Need to Know

When I found out that TIME magazine had named Gintanjali Rao, a young female scientist, their 2020 Kid of the Year, I was filled with both inspiration and apprehension. I felt inspired because this honor sends the message to countless kids that this young woman unashamedly belongs in the world of STEM. But I also felt apprehensive because, as a woman pursuing an education in STEM, I know she will face a number of barriers as she pursues her passions.

Throughout middle school and high school, I always thought the struggle of a “woman in STEM” was an overused cliche. In my high school, my advanced STEM classes were always at least 50% female. Being interested in STEM, and excelling at it, as a woman was normal, even expected. I, like Rao, was unashamed of my dream to become a female scientist.

Things changed when I started school at Columbia University. The class I was most excited about this semester, accelerated physics, has a noticeably high ratio of men to women. While I enjoy working through challenging material with my classmates, I often feel out of place. The stark differences between the number of women in my STEM classes in high school and in college have sobered me to the reality of pursuing STEM as a woman; it is truly a more unequal field than I thought.

My newfound awareness has made me more sensitive to how others may view me. I have become all the more aware of popular TikToks that talk about women who are a 6/10 in reality, but a 10/10 in the engineering building; T-shirts that say “I’m too pretty to do math”; and Voltaire referring to his lover and fellow scientist Emilie du Chatelet as “a great man whose only fault was being a woman.” I’ve had to ask myself: Is my identity as a woman lessened because of my career choice?

The reasons for why women struggle to enter STEM fields in equal numbers to men are often simplified to women not having enough confidence in their abilities. This may be true for a number of women, but a less-talked-about reason is that women who do enter STEM don’t have enough confidence in their femininity as a result of attitudes like the aforementioned discrimination.

This issue is rooted in misogyny. Women constantly face societal expectations to dress and act in certain ways in order to be perceived as feminine by a male-dominated society. Misogyny is also the origin of the common misconception that engineering is “man’s work” and that real women do not look like engineers. In reality, the first computers were operated by women while men were fighting in World War II. However, once personal computers became more prevalent, women were pushed out of the computing field and men were pushed in. In the words of NPR’s Steve Henn in “When Women Stopped Coding,” the idea that computers are for boys became “the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution.”

As a result, people internalized a narrow image of what a coder or a scientist looks like, and it is not a woman. A quantitative study conducted by Elena Makarova of the University of Basel demonstrated that even in children, “traits associated with math and physics” are “hard, serious, distant, sober, strict, robust, and rigid” — the same traits typically associated with masculinity. On the other hand, “the female gender was strongly associated with traits” such as “soft, playful, soulful, dreamy, lenient, frail, and flexible,” which directly contrast those associated with STEM.

People have proposed solutions such as having more female representation in university departments and developing special programs to help women discover their passions for STEM. These efforts will be futile, however, unless there is a change of attitude across all groups of people. Of course, it is important for women to overcome their internalized sexism and recognize their talent But it is equally important for the people around them to change their views on what makes a woman feminine or, moreover, a valuable individual (hint: it’s certainly not their career trajectory). As we remind women in STEM that they are capable, we must simultaneously remind them that their career choice says nothing about their femininity or their value, and we must all believe this in our hearts as well. Do it for Gintajali Rao, so she continues to pursue STEM unashamedly. Do it for me. And, most importantly, do it for all future female scientists.