hearing will now come to order good morning and welcome to the research and science education subcommittee hearing on encouraging the participation of female students in the stem field for the past decades girls and women have made substantial gains in breaking down barriers in both education and the workforce however women's participation rates in certain stem disciplines remain disproportionately low according to an s f although women earn more than half of all science and engineering bachelor's degrees in two thousand and six they are now only about twenty percent of the griese in engineering computer science in physics although this is an improvement from the time when i was earning my mechanical engineering degree at northwestern twenty years ago more can be done to encourage women in these fields we have heard time and time again that as a nation we are not producing enough scientists in engineers the increasing number of technical jobs of the future we need to make sure that we have the scientific and technical workforce that we need if we are to remain a leader in a global economy and is not possible to do this without developing  encouraging all the talent in our nation we must have women engineers computer scientists and physicists by broadening the stem pipeline to include more women in other under represented groups we can strengthen our workforce in the last congress chairman baird work with ms johnson to focus on issues for women in academic science and engineering today we look at the beginning of the pipeline and examine what factors impact women in stem fields from kindergarten through the end of college the issue of female students in stem fields is something that is really close to home for me my wife is a an actuary who is a  fellow with the society of actuaries gone through all her exams and reached the top of her field and i asked her what in courage her what really impacted her on a long the way for her it was a advisor in college who recommended that she go and talk to a math professor who really encouraged her to be a math major and encourage her to thereafter go into actuarial science is so that was her story and that's how she wound up where she is today we know that women can face unique challenges throughout the stem pipeline and we invite today's witnesses to help us understand what these barriers are and how we can break them down is important for the federal government to do its part in supporting research in programs they encourage best practices to attract and retain women in ste but there is a role for disciplinary societies formal informal educators nonprofits businesses and other stakeholders fortunately there's a lot of good work already underway to address some of these challenges i look forward to hearing for a witnesses today about what is working what obstacles remain in where we go from here i think all of our witnesses for being here today and i look forward to your testimony now i'm  will recognize dr a dollars for an opening statement thank you mr chairman and thank you for the good words just spoken today's hearing is an opportunity for us to gain insight into the reasons why young women are being deterred from pursuing careers in science technology engineering and mathematics better known as stem and i think it's essential because each one of us tends to think we know what the problem is and what the answers are but i think we'll get there when we listen to the experts here today we'll find out how wrong we are looking at it from our perspective strength doing math and science education is essential to the future of american economic competitiveness and the lack of female participation in these areas is a great hindrance that must be remedied for one reason just out of fairness to all involved secondly because a nation can certainly benefit from the involvement of more individuals interested in math and science despite the fact that women represent more than half of all bachelor's degrees they constitute only twenty five percent of the stem workforce in the united states spend a considerable amount of time and effort in congress voting and promoting stem education in this committee is held multiple hearings on the topic paying particular attention to the need for more women and minorities in stem fields as a professor i've also spent a good time trying to interest women in math and science particularly with the idea of developing new opportunities for them but also since many of them were to become teachers also changing their perspective on math and science and why it is important to teach math and science to everyone in the elementary school great strides have been made since my days as a student and later as a professor of physics calvin college and berkeley but better still show great disparities in the participation of women in stem much to my dismay women represent only twenty one percent of its physics degrees according to the national science foundation is my hope that today's observations well for this committee insight into ways to better support these important fields of study as we continue to explore any federal role look forward to the testimony of our distinguished panel i thank them for being here but i just have to add one one point that i think is essential and that is that jobs of the future going to require of the workers a basic understanding of the fundamental principles of mathematics and science i don't think there's any disagreement with that if we do not in some way persuade women to learn these topics in the elementary and secondary fields we and they are cutting themselves out of a great many job opportunities in the future so let's hope we can do a better job than we have done i look forward to hearing opening statements your statements will be added to the record at this point so now i want like to introduce our witnesses first we have dr alan leshner who is a chief executive officer of the american association great advancement of science next we have dr marcia crop who is the chief operating officer of girls incorporated dr krop comes to us from new york and i know that mr taco had hoped that he'd be here to introduce her himself but unfortunately he's tied up with another committee this morning in will try to join us at at some point next we have dr sandra hansen who is a professor of sociology at catholic university barbara bo was an associate professor of engineering science in mechanics and women engineering at penn state and finally we cheryl thomas who i know from back home in chicago who has worked in the not only the administration of mayor daley but also in the clinton administration thomas is currently the president and founder of ardmore associates an engineering construction management firm in chicago at their witnesses should know spoken testimony is limited five minutes each after which the members of the committee will have five minutes each to to ask questions i ask you hopefully in the five minutes here your complete written statement will be added to the record so with that we will start with dr leshem recognize you for five minutes thank chairman thank you for your leadership in convening this hearing and thank you for the invitation for us to testify as you know the american association for the advancement of science is the world's largest multi disciplinary scientific society and where the publishers of the well known journal science our involvement in education extends from pre kindergarten through postgraduate and into the careers of the scientific workforce we have a long history of efforts to increase the participation of girls and young women and to enhance the science status of women in science technology engineering and mathematics the first woman president of aaa as was elected in  seventy and since that time thirty five percent of those in the presidential line have been distinguished women one hundred seventy three aaa has created both an office of an a committee on opportunities and science and their activities continues today i'm very pleased to note that since the early days of advocacy and action related to women and stem fields the levels of enrollment and degrees awarded have overall increased dramatically k to twelve levels participation gaps between males and females have disappeared in such courses as chemistry vance algebra and pre calculus mathematics this then has affected women's course taking in professional aspirations at undergraduate and higher levels as one example in one nine hundred seventy seven women received roughly twenty two percent of doctoral degrees in the biological sciences but as you know by two thousand and six women received almost half of biological science ph d s in this country despite this kind of progress however some serious challenges remain and i have to start with a general statement that for k twelve education overall science and math standards are unfortunately way too low for all students whatever their career goals whatever their genders and we as a country have got to do something to change that from my perspective that's the largest problem facing education in this country in high schools and colleges gap still do persist for young women in pursuing courses like physics calculus and computer science as you noted but here the percentage has actually decreased over time and that needs focused attention women overall have about a forty percent share share within the overall physical sciences but that number masks the fact that in two thousand and six although women receive half the bachelor's degrees in fields like astronomy and chemistry as you noted women received only twenty percent of the bachelor's degrees in physics and women still receive only twenty percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering the gap is real the gap exists it's more problematic that even when women do pursue science degrees many we leave this scientific workforce because of a lack of career opportunities that enable them to do a better job balancing having a career and a life outside the laboratory fortunately there have been some but frankly too few federal programs as well as changes in culture and some institutions to change this just as one example the advance program of the national science foundation is an example of an effect e mechanism to foster these accommodations so what can we do well organizations like aaa s have a robust set of career related activities generally working cooperatively through something we established called the center on careers in science and technology and both alone and through external partnerships we produce materials that feature young and established women in stem careers telling their stories providing guidance the guidance counselors and educators we also have a center on advancing science and engineering capacity its purpose is to emphasize research based interventions have demonstrated effectiveness in order to help universities fully develop and utilize the talents of women and minority students and faculty and i might point out that we try to provide role models as well women are active invisible participants in every aspect of the leadership  speakers and organizers of our meetings and conferences leaders in the organizations governance and i should point out that among the senior staff over fifty percent are female how about the federal government many of us believe that a new call to serve for young men and women needs to link the critical role of education and stem fields with the opportunity to address global concerns young people are far more interested in the relevance of what they do with their lives than they were at least in my generation when i was trained as a scientist where if you worried about relevance you had sold out we also need much better data in statistics it's critical to improve the crewmen and retention and stem fields to help identify measures of success and to figure out what's working and what the climate is we also need to support research to help us identify and by their understand best practices that do work that are effective in providing greater support let me conclude by saying that it's critical that the united states have access to the full trial of all its citizens and that every effort has to be made to enable that as we press as we face pressing societal challenges all of whose solutions involve science and technology either directly or indirectly we can't afford to allow the great potential contributions of women to go on tapped thank you very much incorporated that's the national nonprofit that inspires all girls to be strong smart and bold on behalf of girls our ninety six local affiliates and the girls we serve on pleased to present our approach to advancing girls interest confidence and competence in stem fields in one nine hundred eighty five with funding from the national science foundation we launched girls inc operation smart our program to help girls develop enthusiasm for and skills in stem since that time more than seven hundred fifty thousand girls have participated in the ram our experience with operation smart and our research and development leads us to three important messages for you today first despite gains in the number and achievement of girls and women in stem substantial gaps remain over the past thirty years as the barriers of entry into many stem fields of these women a vastly increased their proportion of academic degrees earned in stem as you just heard at the same time however gaps remain girls in the united states today grow up at a time when women have unprecedented opportunities but they're also aware that in our society stereotypes persist in a two thousand and six girls next survey conducted by harris interactive fifty five percent of girls and grades three through twelve agreed with this statement in my school boys think they have the right to talk about girls bodies in public forty four percent of girls half almost half agreed that the smartest girls in my school are not popular thirty six percent said people think girls are not interested in computers and technology and seventeen percent of girls thought it was true that teachers think it's not important for girls to be good at math and those statistics by the way didn't change months and  earlier survey in two thousand just last finding leads to our second message that informal science education is a critical strategy to address the gender gap the national academy has recently published a report on learning science in informal settings advising that schools should not be soley responsible for addressing the scientific knowledge needs of society and we have girls think a great informal education allows students the ability to learn to discover through prolonged hands on collaborative experiences to become comfortable making the stakes and using trial and error method to solve complex problems just cite just one example at our girls inc affiliate in schenectady new york girls created working crafts they were so excited by their success that they decided to try to bring their experiment to scale using plywood and a leaf blower they constructed a hovercraft that was strong enough to lift girls four inches off the floor and we know that our approach has an impact girls in your reka are four week stem sports camp increased their plans to take math courses their interest in science careers increased as well and the percentage of girls who were predominantly urban minority girls whose wish for the following school year was to do well and be on the honor roll increase from thirty eight percent to sixty six percent girls think we pay explicit attention to equity we assume girls are interested in math science and technology we encourage them to see themselves as a scientist when our first robotics lego league teams go to competitions staff of observed  boys who are operating the robots on the coed team on our teams and those sponsored by our friends the girl scouts girls do it all we expect girls to succeed and we help them to develop the same expectations of themselves we also include adult women role models as they are essential in helping girls to be aware of career options and to envision themselves in those careers someday in two thousand and four we surveyed women who had previously received girls in college scholarships of the eighty five respondents fifty one percent said my girls think it's period inspired me to pursue my interest in science technology engineering and mathematics my final point is that the federal government has a vital role to play in increasing girls participation in stem first continue to support the n s f informal science education program and the research on gender in science and engineering secondly promote informal stem education through federally funded afterschool program third support professional development for teachers and youth workers in informal stem education and engender equitable teaching methods and finally promote the increased enforcement of title nine thank you for doing your part through this important work of the committee as we say it girls think it doesn't matter where a girl is from as long as she knows where she is going  university i've been doing research on girls and science for several decades now and it's a pleasure to be here one of the myths about girls in science is that from the time they start school girls are less interested in science and boys in my research and that of others we show girls start out with equal interests and abilities in science things start changing though as early as the second grade and when they draw a woman scientist she's fairly severe and i'm happy looking i've found that the departure from stem even happens for very talented girls who show promise and what about the nature versus nurture argument the notion that boys are naturally better at math and science continues to be a popular one a recent study looked at three pairs of british twins  and nine ten and twelve years of age they looked at genetic and environmental factors that affected math and science achievement they found no difference in math and science achievement at nine ten and twelve and more importantly no difference in the influence of genetic and environmental factors on the boys and girls at these ages so they concluded it's more about attitude than aptitude so what's going on why are women leaving one of the issues is textbooks if students don't see images in textbooks of people that look like themselves they can't connect science textbooks are improving but they show many more images of male scientists one n s f funded study at colorado state looked at elementary school science textbooks and found sixty six percent of the images were of men and thirty four percent of women but there's been progress in stem education recently for the first time ever two women young girls won the grand prize in the prestigious siemens national math and science competition and my research shows there's more progress in stem education than occupations so that in two thousand six women earned twenty percent of the ph d s in engineering but there were only twelve percent of the employed engineers in some areas girls get more degrees then boys chemistry sciences are two of them employers can no longer argue that there's a shortage of qualified female science talent one of the things that's implicit in my research is that you can't just talk about girls in science science is not just a male culture it's a white male culture so that in the point and lesson from my work is that men and women experiences in science vary across social class and race groups when i looked at african american women in science recently i found tremendous interest and engagement and many people have missed this including social scientists who think that the race and gender disadvantage is a double disadvantage for them they must not be interested in although i have found a loss of science talent amongst young women i'm quite optimistic i see more interest i see the interest of much minority women i also have looked at the role of sport as a resource for young women  encourages independence teamwork competition the same traits that tend to be associated with women success in the male domain of science so female athletes have an advantage in science over non athletes and so young girls who are given an early opportunity in sport might be less intimidated and more prepared for the culture of the science classroom i'm also encouraged by evidence from single sex education many women scientists today have spent at least some of their time at single sex universities in two thousand and six several researchers at university of michigan studied the progress of girls in two schools almost identical math curriculum but one was coed and one was single sex and at the end of the year they measured their progress in  from those in the single sex school scored in the coed school by over fifty percent there's things that work there's things that we can do my time is running short but i know that the new practice guide published by the national center for education research in titled encouraging girls in math and side offers a very specific things for schools and teachers in terms of increasing girls participation and interest in science guides such as this one should be integrated into our curriculum girls deserve equal access to stem and we can do better and i think both boys and girls and i'm speaking today for the society of women engineers founded in one thousand nine hundred fifty three is a twenty thousand member educational service organization that empowers women to succeed in advanced in the field of engineering  first i'd like to thank the subcommittee for providing the fabric to nettie and really appreciated your comments so i should start up with a mr chairman mr ranking member and members of the subcommittee i will focus my comments on the need for improved assessment evaluation practices and the specific challenges that we face in our effort to increase the numbers of girls and women entering and succeeding in stem related fields i want to size engineering of my primary experience and knowledge but the basic assumptions and recommendations really can apply across stem fields in which women are underrepresented we know that women are graduating from high school and prepared to enter engineering high school girls take forty seven percent of all a calculus tests and thirty one percent of a p physics test so the real question is not whether and women can do engineering it's why aren't they doing engineering and how can we get them there once he has a better understanding of what works and what not what does not as director of women in engineering i developed the women engineering program at penn state and i developed an orientation their bridge program that yielded the highest retention rate of any program in the college of engineering for that i was recognized with the presidential award for excellence in science mathematics and engineering mentoring develop developing an assessment plan to measure the success of the program with rose project which i'll talk about in a bit help me understand what was working and led to the realization that the need for help in creating good assessment and evaluation is a universal need among programs with lean budgets and staff so we created the assessing women and men in engineering project which is funded by n s f gender and science and engineering program research in gender and science and engineering program to develop survey tools that measure program effectiveness and allow comparisons about comes among programs we have more than fifty of these tools now all the surveys along with a lot of capacity building tools are moved into the society of women engineers to stay in the projects many projects and services a list of current products is submitted for the hearing records assessment is essential for success and funders have a role to play the federal government should require a meaningful assessment of funded activities aimed toward the goal of our broadening participation federal title nine reviews like those conducted by nasa are an effective tool for identifying activities that would benefit from added scrutiny there are many ways to break down barriers to the recruitment and development of women in stand in addition to having better assessment of the program i will focus on three first applying to research to practice is essential for success basic research through programs like n s f g s t is a critical tool for increasing the numbers of women in engineering and other stem fields second climate studies are important in uncovering barriers for women in engineering and welcoming classrooms outdated teaching styles a lack of calm accommodation for different social or cultural experiences a lack of good advising can all create an environment the students decide to leave rather than thrive and this effects all students men and women all results the all project results and other findings belie the postulation that women do not pursue engineering because they are not interested or don't have the talent rather they indicate that women who have the talent and the interest are being turned off by how the discipline is being presented finally sustained in targeted funding as necessary funding for basic research funding to design and implement programs and funding to support individuals in conclusion we'd like to recommend the following sustain and target funding for programs and activities that focus on attracting and retaining women in stem careers are removing institutional barriers to their success basic research related to those goals review federal funding requirements and set guidelines to ensure that funded programs address national priorities that we've all talked about here today and attract a diverse population support the continuation of federal title nine reviews to increase understanding of the issues that inhibit full participation of women in stem at the college level and finally support women who wish to pursue engineering degrees reward institutions that are successful in increasing the number of women studying stem disciplines forty years ago the and set foot on the moon because we had the national will to achieve that goal but we also supported it financially one example is  national defense education act which ensured an innovative and productive engineering workforce that could do the work to get there president obama has set out an equally ambitious goal to increase r and d funding to levels exceeding those of the space race to achieve full participation of women and other other under represented groups in this bold new endeavor requires a bold commitment we at the society of women engineers look forward to and support your efforts in this regard thank you for the opportunity good morning mr chairman ranking member distinguished members of congress on the subcommittee i am both humbled employees and i've been asked to testify before you today rather than a direct academic pursuit of engineering i came to the field by quite  h actually i really did not know anyone personally who was an engineer however through the encouragement and development of my scientific and mathematical aptitude in the forward thinking of leaders in my life my mother teachers and mentors i came to the stem fields i hope that you can bear with me for a few moments while i give you a brief synopsis of my career path my earliest recollection of building materials was a christmas morning when i spied a very large box of tinker toys for my older brother he admonish me not to put my sticky paws on his shaker toys they were special for him to build things of course i couldn't wait to set the big bin alarm clock to get up in the middle of the night and play with that step as fortune one hundred eighteen eventually my brothers got an erector set the tinker toys cast aside became mine the first thing i built was a windmill all these years later when i see the wind turbines the landscape in rural areas i have wondered how many of the engineers who have designed or built winter been had their interest in their youth by a simple set of tinkertoys throughout my academic career i was always interested in the sciences and i was encouraged to think about or pursue the biological sciences in high school i demonstrate an aptitude for chemistry my career path was that i would concentrate on biology and chemistry and think about medicine or scientific research i received awards for participating in science fairs all four years of high school one saturday a month i went to the science academy in lincoln park and every other sunday to the museum of science and industry where i lived in high park armed with this foundation i went off to university prepared to major in by a large biology and chemistry i completed my undergraduate studies and went to work for the department of water and sewers in the city of chicago as a research chemist i was quite content in this role i completed a master's degree while working for the city and began course work for dr the latter was interrupted when i was chosen as the first woman to participate in a program of sending young people up until this point in time young male engineers to work in various units of the department of water and source of cultivate an understanding of how the not only the units work department worked in total it is very important to note that this decision was made by the commissioner of the department i was assigned to the chief engineer in the commissioner's office the time period was the early sevent 's was not as simple or easy decision to make to complicate matters i was not a degreed engineer instead i was learning on the job and i thank him always the chief engineer convinced me to go back to school and take engineering course that was the end of the buy i allowed sciences and the beginning of a new endeavor i was the first woman to work in the on a shut off for the department of water eventually i ended up running that  over the barrier as i say this was unusual women were not supposed to work there were no facilities for women and quite frankly women would interfere with the way men talk and work over a short period of time  overseeing all the infrastructure departments when i went to work in mayor daley's office as his deputy chief of staff in one thousand nine hundred four the mayor appointed me as commissioner of the department of building i was the first woman to hold a position in this completion of any daunting task the biggest challenges to attracting and retaining women and girls in the i think our exposure at an early age encouraging in a nurturing of ideas pervasive funding to add programs of mathematics chemistry and physics to primary as well as secondary education girls and young women to other women who are pursuing these  humble way i do think drawing attention to women like myself who have come through the who have persevered and who are now president and c e o of their own engineering firm helps to promote the value of being smart girls and women w aptitude in closing i would like to thank you again for inviting me to testify before you today i am committed through various organizations and academic institutions to promoting not only women and minorities and sciences but also to developing interests and skills and expanding stem opportunities to people as a whole i heard a very disturbing statistic that only about four percent of our young people in this country seek to have careers in the sciences those seeking these careers in other countries are as high as forty percent if we do not address this issue who will build our roads and bridges is a question we must answer thank you chairman and thank all of you for being here today we know that research has shown us that certainly female stem role models are the best way to encourage young people young women to become involved in this area and no offense mr leshner but i just would love for some of the young people in our open schools in particular to see you here today and to be encouraged by what you have done in your careers and i thank you for being here and i thank you for your testimony as well the question i have because i am keenly aware that in our schools in particular which i represent primarily there are very few role models in our schools whether they be counsellors or science teachers or  engineers and that's the unfortunate part of this so my question becomes how do we incorporate in an informal education a way dealing with the under represented groups in the stem fields and how do we get to young women especially african american women in our communities and what best practices can we use that can be transferred from an informal setting to a classroom setting anyone or everyone ok well i agree with you completely about your issue about role models and role models for girls of color three quarters of the girls served by girls incorporated are girls of color are operation smart program includes the whole concept of bringing in adult women scientists engineers and mathematicians architects  archaeologists to work on projects with a girl it's not just a career day where a woman comes in and talks about her career but the girls actually see adult women making mistakes because making mistakes  science is important how you learn and they see adult women scientists getting their hands dirty and they can talk casually with them about what it's like to have a scientific career i just recently finished a study in young african american women in science it's swimming against the tide and when i talk to them surveyed them they don't see their schools as having good resources they don't see people as thinking much of them becoming scientists one of the young girls said they look at us like we're not supposed to be scientists and so what they want is people who think that they can do what they want more resources in their schools they know they can see that their schools have fewer resources especially since their labs are not good labs but they want field trips they want hands on labs and i think we need to figure out a way to redistribute our resources so that if you're unlucky enough to be going to school in a poor school district you shouldn't be punished with poor science labs back to answer back and just say one thing about your comments well too i think you're right about athletes that because i was an athlete but i was on the way that about science i'm learning as i sit on this committee every day but i love the concept of what you said because it does encourage you and it makes you believe that there are things you can do  as well i want to say that as i leave here and i'm going to be doing that shortly because we have a mock up in our education and labor committee we're going to be talking about exactly what you said we're going to be finding ways to bring more resources into our schools especially our urban cores for labs for a computer technology for things that we think are going to make young people more able to actually understand to get excited about what's out there because they can do hands on so i thank you as well thank you i'd like to add a couple things to that one of the intentionality of role modeling that i think the idea of bringing them in informally not specifically as role models this is an excellent idea but it's very very important to assess the process and look at whether those role models that have fact in fact done the work that you want them to do it's very possible to have people who look like they're going to be perfect role models to come in and end up discouraging the children from going on so that's an important thing and i think another thing is that when when we do bring these people in it can be informal but it also has to be very intentional they have to understand why they are there and what they should be doing to make sure that these girls and boys make the connection between them being there and working with them and what they can do in their li you're absolutely right athletics does help out with an athlete and it does help and you also have to be able to step outside your comfort zone to be the first woman to go on the street with a crew i can't even impress upon you how difficult that was but the fact is you have to stay with it you can't be easily discouraged and i was armed with the knowledge that i probably knew as much as they did and once we both became comfortable it was fine i think that we really do have to nurture young girls to realize that they have ideas that it's ok you don't have to be channeled somewhere else and that that's kind of what happened to me i was challenged thank god research rather than the hard sciences of which i went back into just fine because i could  persevere in those fields all i think nurturing and sticking with it is very important thank you go to their near school go to your kid's school talk to the teachers ask if you can go in and talk to the class and just tell them what you do in your work and perhaps arrange a field trip to your lab or your harvests or if you're a civil engineer  take him out on the job having learned how bridges are designed and made and i think that's a very important activity this is scourging part of some of these people have done that have been turned on by the teachers and say we don't have time for that which is very unfortunate i was amused by your common mistake when you joined the crew it's seemed to affect the way men talked and having served on a construction crew myself in my college years i can say you probably only improved their language it's not a pretty picture another comment was made i think  something about girls feel ostracized by others when they study the sciences and math and particularly when they do well that's not uncommon in fact i experience the same thing even though obviously i'm a male but i still remember even at the college level getting a paper back in class test paper and immediately slapping it on the desk face down so that my colleagues could see what grade i got and just it's incredible that someone who did well has to be ashamed of what they did but yet that's part of what goes on in society times it's  way for the less competent to get even with the us post but i do it when i had to speak in high schools i make a big deal out of this and this first of all i'm a nerd and i'm proud of it which shocks them a little bit first of all they don't believe until i show my pocket protector that i talked a bit about that as the richest man in the world they all know that he's a nerd i can predict that when you get out of school and that's what using the right courses or important and high school when you get out of school and you start looking for a job and your choices are pretty simple you will either be a nerd or you're going to work for nerd not with which of those do you want to and it really sort of wakes them up you know they just don't have that much contact with the real world and does does make them think  some of this i think applies very well to girls and women as well just to say hey lots of upturned attorneys are thirty may not have heard about them they may not even appeal to you at this point but think about it just think about it and what what you can do i'm just delighted with what you've done and you are a living example to a lot of the women and the girls in the schools today and that has to be multiplied over and over again  eight prejudices that we have in society are still there and there are many types of them and we have to we have to break through the mold on that so i just want to thank you for what you've done and i learned a great deal from your comments here and i hope we can all working together continue to to illuminate this problem because a nomination is half the battle and some of the things we've done in this  minutes thank you very much mr chairman for letting me sit in to have the higher ed markup which is very important to women and girls women particularly by higher ed and them and thank you for being here today and dr lash thank you for and getting it for women and under representative groups and all of you wonderful women for setting such a good example of this is an issue that is very important to me otherwise i would come to a subcommittee i'm not a member of believe me because we have to get more involved girls involved in stem education to keep them there  not just getting him involved but keeping them interested throughout school so that they can turn it into a career at the very least when i say young women under represented minorities don't have to be scientists engineers mathematicians but they have to have the option by the time they get to college and if they cut themselves off and act disinterested don't get involved in the right curriculum to have it available to them by the time to get to college it's too late so that's why i sponsored the inclusion of the appropriately named patsie fellowships in the higher that passed by congress and was signed into law by president bush last year because the pats fellowships provide funding and fellowships to encourage women and minorities to go into the graduate programs where they are represented under represented like the stamp program and then move them into teaching fields because part of it is having a female or a minority model if your teacher that is so important and beyond that i have introduced to of many congresses in a row and i'm preparing to reintroduce a bill i call go girl which will provide grants to schools to remote damaged cation for girls and under represented minorities from k through twelve because i've been working on this issue both for elementary education and for graduate study for many many years because if we don't get more girls and under represented minorities into the stem fields we're going to be sending our jobs overseas i mean first of all we want these groups to have the advantage that the stamp provides them and we want the advantages a nation of their great brilliance of like all of you have represented up here but we don't want to be sending these jobs overseas with the new green industries and green technologies riseth here and not have enough brainpower to make this happen when we know we have it so my question to you and i know i've talked a long time to be getting answers now  and how important it is for their parents and their teachers to step in and encourage them middle school is a is a big area that girls come into and  the popularity begins to play in the attitudes of teachers the access to facilities so what we always encourage girls to do is just kind of be able to go underground and be able to make sure that they follow their interests and are comfortable with being a little bit odd and i think that's where the sports can really come into that that they can be proud of this i think you also get another big break when the girls are in high school and are deciding as you point out what kind of curriculum they're going to take a lot of and under represented minorities a lot of the students at that point opt out of higher level math that's very hard to make up at the university level going into the university you get a lot of students starting out in in ste fields and they'll start to make the decision not to i was speaking with a colleague today who is saying that she opted out of engineering because she wanted to study russia and the curriculum didn't accommodate that that's changing but it needs to change more because of course the engineers we need today need to have a broader liberal arts type education right dr hansen i agree middle school girls start moving towards getting  status from a man take relationships during that time even very talented ones the status comes more from that then from academics but i might also say that as early as second grade these draw scientists showed them even if they're talented in science and math they're drawing pictures of male scientists and just to one of your other points about the labor the science labor force i think there's a lot of proof now that we need a diverse science labor force for better ideas and better inventions and better science and there i'm so glad that there's people that have shown that we do better science with more diversity in report that they conducted with the girl scouts which shows that women are more likely than men to say they entered careers in stem because of encouragement from a teacher or a family member or a friend and we also a girl thing find parents extremely important in our most recent publication thinking smart we have a whole section called smart at home which we've actually translated into spanish for latino families that has resources and suggestions about things you can do at home to encourage your started with athletics we must not let that stop and now we need to have education exactly that level or greater so thank you again thank you and i will do your own i'll recognize themsel for five minutes as i was listening to all this i certainly had similar experiences as you know going through my time in college as an engineer and i certainly think that things a lot of things that could have been better for for everybody there are broader issues for everyone in  who's in the in the stem field certainly i don't think that there was enough in my education in terms of really relating what we were doing in the classroom to the real world there was not enough connection between the classroom in the real world with professionals who are out there so i certainly understand those and i i think then that there is a as he said probably a special place for women the subcommittee next week on systems approach to stem ed which includes some of those areas because i think informal science education is very important and also all the factors that have an impact on who is who is going to go into the stem fields who's going to that's going to send fields with getting the stem education which is not just for those who are going to make that make that their career so for everyone stay tuned next week for that for next hearing on that but i think this plays very well it into that one question i want to  to ask is why are there some feels like physics in computer science that representation of women is so low whereas other fields like sixty two percent and of biology breeds go to women i mean i did not want that was one area that was the one area i did not want to be involved whatsoever when i was in school i remember having to dissect a fetal pig in high school and that when i was in school so but why are these other fields why is there it seems in some of these fields that we've put in to insist there is much greater female participation while others that there is less what what's causing that what we know about it we want to start out maybe i can a little bit i think a large problem generally is that absence of highly visible role models that is in some fields that have a history of being less than fully friendly to women the absence of very well known and very well respected role models is a problem and i think that we need to do a better job of highlighting those successful role models for example in astronomy we have people like ruben who's among the most respected scientists in this country and she has inspired a large number of young women we just don't seem to give recognition to women in some fields as much as we do in others the number of role models the life sciences who are women far exceeds the percentage in most of these other fields so that one feels as if it's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy and we do know that role models play a very important role as to teachers the fact that young woman has a female teacher has a far greater influence on her willingness to enter stem fields then the gender of  young man's teacher that that makes sense was that in english i meant it to be good thank you and that's true for under represented minorities as well both i guess my first response is we wish we knew because then we could do more about it and there is a lot of research in this area and certainly the role model is very important the critical mass is very important i mean we're tossing around the eighteen percent number for women  graduated in engineering if you look at electrical engineering or or mechanical engineering we're down to the eleven and twelve percent which means that girls can go if women can go through undergraduate programs and literally never see another woman in your class or never importantly you have a woman professor the head of the class and so this is an important thing that they they don't find out about it but then i think the more important thing is climate we go back to the climate issue these are male professions they have been developed by males and so there's pretty much generally a male environment and unless there's some intervention that makes it comfortable for people who aren't male who aren't white male to come into the those environments it's hard for women to penetrate it and we hear this all the time it's not anecdotal we see it in research and the way that women respond in their decisions  why they go into particular disciplines and finally i think it's very important to look at how they are recruited into these what they see when they look at it the recent national academies report on changing the conversation touched on this are a lot of things that are controversy all about that report but it is really important to remember that when we talk about mechanical engineering we shouldn't just talk about motors we should talk about all of the other things that mechanical engineering did errand and then we know that medical is the one exception to our girls are encouraged to go on to become doctors now and nurses nurse practitioners but they're encouraged to go ahead and you see in some of the larger  the engineering disciplines have larger proportions of women chemical engineering bioengineering environmental engineering have that kind of components i think we see some of the beneficial bleed off from girls understanding that they can be interested in these dr cheryl touched on the issue of toys i don't think we can address toys and games enough computer science is something that boys have such an advantage because they do play computer toys computer games so much more than young girls they just feel that they're naturally suited to it so i think the issues of toys and games and parents is also very good stuff and i think that it's  quite interesting and i certainly don't know the psychology of it but it seems to be that if you are interested in the sciences or in math or physics that for some reason for young women it is a natural to attract to go into medicine and certainly we need good doctors and biomechanical engineering is becoming a field that is huge and a lot of women now feel that it's comfortable for them to go into that and as i said i think you have to step outside your comfort zone and i neglected to mention as well that when i was a young person dois are important but i did get many medical kits you know those balls were given to me and i could play doctor and operate on my doll that was the last time i got a doll and operated on the doll and you know you take all the candy little pills and all that sort of thing and it's ok and that it's fine for you to play with sorts of things so i think that there has to be somewhat of a psychological and an attitude change and that it's ok if girls want to play with erector sets and if they want to go into engineering i took physics and i certainly enjoyed it but it was just one of those core sorts of courses i was taking to pursue medical research thank you one way or my time here i will now we'll and did not deliberately try to encourage my children to go into math or science i did however almost require them to take some math and science so they would know what it is so that make an intelligent decision about whether or not they want and so one of my sons is an engineer and just loves my daughters make heavy use of the technical knowledge but they're not technical fields but it's just very useful to them and they haven't danced because of that the youngest son who informed me at a very early age that he was never going to study math he was never going to be a scientist and just you know i was fuming  about it and hated math in high school and so forth and just rebelled all the way through and today as a professor of physics the point is simply you never know what's going to happen that's going to affect their lives my last question a comment dr hansen you mentioned that several countries new zealand iceland finland albania thailand have made great progress in treating gender equity i think it's some of both if you look at all equity issues and gender in those countries they tend to be ahead not just women in science i think part of it is equity in the larger education system the social socialized education and medicine so the problem that we're talking about earlier with an equal access to good education doesn't happen to the same extent there  the climate of gender is different in those countries women are a larger number of scientists a larger number of professional women don't see being a professional as being in conflict  with being a mother a family member this is a big problem for keeping girls out of science no i think they have to be married to science and can't be married to anybody else so as you get into a gender climate where people don't believe that anymore and some of these countries they pay people to stay home and be with their kids so you can have status and access from being both in these countries so i think when we make better education and have more  gender climates will also improve science although they have been working in particular you know smaller classes more accessibility better trained teachers but i think it's a larger cultural issue that's important misspoke i think and i appreciate your comments we have my husband is also a mechanical engineer and we are our daughter spent a lot of time telling us she would never go into engineering and if she did she'd never gone to mechanical she's a mechanical engineer so they can't get past some time but i think that with role models it's very very important to understand that there are very negative role models out there too that if you have people in science and engineering and mathematics who are demonstrating to people that there is no life outside of those fields or who are representing in that way then that really is a big discouragement factor for students or if you as i mentioned earlier if you set up your curricula so that there isn't room to go in and pursue your music or pursue other interests that's a clear message to students that that they shouldn't go on to study this because they'd have to give up too many other parts of their  lives but i think that going back to the role modeling again that it's extremely important we do have to remember that there are negative role models and address that and to make these changes there has to be real intentionality it has to be something like what we see with girl thing where where they're really working with the kids and what's remarkable that organization is not just one camp or one time they keep going back to the students and reinforcing for them what's important and what they can to  people on in front of them role models are extremely important i spent a lot of time in my youth around people who were involved in the sciences and my brother majored in physics so i knew a lot of people and i was very young who were involved in the sciences but if i could take just a second to say one thing how people react to a situation is very important as well when i first went downtown as part of  the engineering program to introduce people who were going to work for the city of chicago forever and to different disciplines in the water department the reason i went was the filtration engineer whom i work for he had daughters and he believed that girls should not be working ships or be in a plant with men and whatever and i was up for a promotion and the only way to promote me was to put me out into the filtration as a as a control chemist and he didn't want to do that downtown to work for who was the chief engineer for the entire department also only had girls but he thought that girls should have all the advantages the boys had and he was going to convince me to go back to school for engineering so you have two but my friends who are in sui seem to really find it very helpful and i think the important of having support groups also i think that's something that  is critical it was there year in whether you're in college or wherever it is support groups of people who are doing similar things that what you're doing is also something that they can be helpful and thinks we certainly serve that role for for a lot of women who are engineering majors well with that i want to for i want for a close i want to thank all the witnesses for for being here today for testifying before the committee obviously this is something that is not going to to go away there's progress that has been made obviously and we've talked about that but certainly more has to be done and i think that this has to be considered not just a you know not just an issue for women but for our country as we struggle  th trying to get more people into stem education and into the into the stem fields that's critical for the future of our of our country so i thank you all of you for the work that that you are doing  this so for the official statement here the record will remain open for additional statements from members and for answers to any follow up questions the committee may ask the witnesses and with that the witnesses