Young Women in STEM
By: Stephanie Armour
Tags: Gender Equality, Women in STEM, Engineering, STEM, Young Women

One thing I believe that isn’t spoken about enough, is young women in STEM. We are constantly reminded of high-achieving women in STEM sectors and their many accomplishments, but how often do we hear about their upbringing and what shaped them into the woman they are today?

We are all aware of how our childhood and background has a massive impact on where we can end up later on in life. We understand that toys aimed at girls such as the Barbie, perpetuate the ideology that girls should care about how their makeup and hair looks, whereas those targeted at boys such as Action Man, show boys they have to be strong and powerful.

Now in the 21st century, we now are trying to put an end to gender branded toys. Many experts claim that we should be giving our children gender-neutral toys such as wooden blocks or animal toys. While I believe that this is all a step in the right direction, I believe we don’t talk about gender imbalances when these children reach high school.

I am an 18 year-old woman, currently studying for my MEng degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde. I am only in my first year of my studies, which means I am fresh out of high school, and I wanted to talk about my experience with gender imbalance throughout the past few years. I went to a high-achieving school in Glasgow where there was an even split between boys and girls in my year group, which was formed of about 150 students. I knew from my first year when I was around 12 years old that I loved science. I always received fantastic results and I enjoyed my classes so much that I ended up participating in extra-curricular activities such as the science olympiads set up by British Universities for eager students. I was good at maths, physics, chemistry and biology, and I briefly considered studying medicine. There were lots of girls in my year who had their heart set on medicine, and when I was around 15 years old, I thought I was one of these girls too. As I progressed through high school, fewer and fewer girls chose to study physics and chemistry and fewer and fewer boys chose to study biology, so I felt a pressure to continue with biology. In my penultimate year in school, I realised while I was good at biology, it wasn’t what I was passionate about, and my dream about being a doctor was over.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of women in science, which is great news. However, there has only been a breakthrough in subjects such as Psychology and Medicine, which are currently female-dominated sectors. According to the WES in 2018, women only make up 12.37% of engineers in the entire of the UK. We have encouraged girls to pursue STEM careers, but only the ones which are associated with feminine traits such as being caring and expressing feelings. It shows that women do not lack ability or ambition, and definitely have the ability to become engineers.

Something I will always remember from high school (this only happened two years ago) is when we got our exam results back in physics class. I got my paper handed to me upside down as usual, and when I flipped it over to see my result, I realised my hard work and passion for the subject had paid off with an almost-perfect result. Our school was very competitive, with prizes given to the highest achieving students. My teacher proceeded to read my name out to tell the class that I had achieved the highest mark. He said well done. Then, immediately after, the boy who sat in the row in front of me turned around to face me and said, “I can’t believe the highest mark came from a girl!”. At the time I thought nothing of this, I probably just made a smart remark and screwed up my face, but looking back on this moment really angers me. Why (in this day of age) is it surprising that a girl can understand science?

I studied physics up until the second I left school. There came a point where I was the only girl left in the class. My teacher would give us reading exercises or calculations to do and he would circle the classroom, talking to each of us as he went around. To my male peers, he would discuss the work at hand, asking them how they were finding it. When he arrived at my desk, he asked what I was doing at the weekend and nothing else. It made me so mad to be dismissed by my own teacher, as I felt like he had no hope for me doing well in the class.

In my final year of school, I looked further into STEM subjects and I came across engineering. It sounded fascinating. It seemed almost perfect because it combined my dream of helping others with using my scientific ability, without biology. I looked into all branches of engineering, and chemical engineering just seemed perfect for me. It seemed like the sky was the limit with this degree and from the second I heard about it, I knew I wanted to study it at university. Now that I have started my course, I believe I have made the correct decision. I went with what I wanted, not what my parents wanted or what my 12 year-old self wanted. In a sense, I feel privileged to be given the chance to have been able to do what I loved in school, and while I was never discouraged from it, I was definitely pushed towards other things, such as medicine. I ended up being the only girl in the entire year group who went to university to study an engineering degree.

Now that I am in university, I live in the city centre of Glasgow, in the halls of residence. I have a great friend group; one of my best friends is studying Biomedical Engineering and the others are studying very different subjects such as business and english. At the very beginning of the semester when I was trying to make friends, of course one of the first things I told people was what course I am studying. When I asked people to guess what I studied, I began to notice a pattern, as they always replied with things such as Law, Psychology and English. When I asked them why they thought these things, they just replied with, “you have the look” or “you seem like the type”.

When we think of girls in STEM, we think of quiet, nerdy girls who don’t wear makeup and don’t care about what they’re wearing. We need to stop this. My friends would describe me as a ‘girly girl’; I love wearing makeup, I love fashion, I have a large friend group, I go out every weekend, I love to gossip and watch shows such as ‘Celebs Go Dating’ on Channel 4. Now that we are trying to encourage more and more girls to pursue careers in STEM subjects, we must stop picking and choosing which girls can do so. Every girl is just as capable, and we can’t dismiss them solely based for their interests, personalities and appearances. You can solve a cubic equation and like talking about boys to your best friend on the phone. You can calculate the entropy of mixing and paint you nails. ‘Girly girls’ aren’t stupid. Let’s stop forcing girls who like science to fit these standards.