While women make up almost 50% of the workforce, they only occupy about 29% of science, technology, engineering, and math-related professions, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The effort to get more females to pursue these jobs begins in the classroom. 

It’s essential to create a more even distribution of males to females within STEM fields, as the increase in views from less represented groups leads to overall benefits. For instance, CJ Koll stated, “Having diverse perspectives on teams is important to innovation and creating new products.”

But there currently aren’t many girls taking interest in advanced STEM classes. Koll teaches Introduction to Engineering and AP Physics C, which can be taken with a mechanics or electricity & magnetism focus. He concluded that in all of these classes, the majority of students are male. 

“In Intro to Engineering, out of about 130 students this year, there have been 11 female students,” added Koll. The class has just started as a part of the CTE program, and there hasn’t been much change in the gender distribution within it between this year and the year prior. 

However, the number of female students taking his other courses has differed over time. “In terms of my AP classes before the pandemic, I was really close to 50/50,” he continued. Now, though, the people taking those classes are more predominantly male. 

While STEM classes are currently more male-dominated, science and technology extracurriculars don’t include this same sense of division. Our robotics team, for example, attempts to encourage girls to get involved and create a more inclusive environment. 

Sophomore Avani Patel from the robotics team said, “We don’t really have a lot of gender gaps in our team because it’s mostly led by women.” She included that other teams, however, don’t have the same sense of inclusivity and female involvement. 

There are ways schools could better support women wishing to pursue STEM to increase involvement in science and technology classes or extracurriculars. Koll believes it is up to teachers and classmates to inspire other students to join STEM classes.

He stated, “It’s really on us as science teachers to push students that we think would be a good fit to take these other classes, whether they’re male or female, and from underrepresented groups as well.” Then, these classes would better have classes with more evenly distributed student populations.