Not everyone has, in those awkward teen and tween years, the composure of Emily Fowler. She’s now cofounder and VP of Possibilities at HeroX, an innovation group that encourages competition to solve big problems and grew from the X Prize model. “When I was in tenth grade, my dad found out about this summer camp called ‘Get Wired Get Hired,’ which was held at Bentley University. My dad was a stockbroker professionally, but a computer nerd passionately. As such, he always taught me about computers as he built and programmed them. He found out about this program and recommended that I go. I thought it sounded really cool—it was a computer camp for girls. How fun!” She continues, “I’ve never been one to be self-conscious about being cool or uncool. Seriously, thank gosh for that—my parents (and teachers) instilled a strong sense of self. When I chose to attend the camp, I was teased by kids from school upon my return. It didn’t help that the local newspaper had featured a story about me attending the camp—they were trying to highlight and encourage more girls to attend tech-oriented camps.”
When the high school crowd tried to tear her down, Emily wasn’t buying it. “The stereotypes were your traditional comments like ‘nerd,’ ‘dork,’ ‘loser.’ Oh, and my personal favorite was ‘lesbian.’ Fortunately, I didn’t care, and I had a sharp enough mouth at a young age that when people—and by people, I do mean guys—said that to me, I would just retort with, ‘First of all, being a lesbian is not an insult. Secondly, being smart or curious doesn’t make me a lesbian. What did you learn at football camp?’ Girls teased me as well, and that was a bit hurtful. Mostly, they were concerned that I would be seen as a lesbian. Again, I didn’t care—I wasn’t interested in impressing a guy who didn’t think I was cool just the way I was. I knew from a young age that I wanted to attract people who were like me.”
Now Emily’s job includes taking what she learned while working as a director at the X Prize and applying it to new enterprises. She credits her father with inspiration. “My dad’s influence was mainly in his encouragement of my involvement with computers,” she said. “He just made it seem so fun and exclusive—like I was learning how to do something that only adults knew how to do.”
“Education” can cover a lot of ground when it comes to women learning science, math, technology, engineering, and business. There are the early years, when parental, scholastic, and societal factors can encourage or discourage girls. Then, as Emily Fowler found, there are the teen and tween years—middle/junior high school through high school in the United States. Teasing and judgments can be merciless. College presents a different set of challenges, with professors not always able to see equal potential in different genders and races. And finally, there is adult education—whether it comes in the form of signing up for a MOOC (a massive open online course you follow on your computer—some free, some for a fee, some for degree credit) or short-term intensives like Hacker School.
And of course, it’s worth remembering that before educational biases and discrepancies come cultural biases carried from generation to generation. Sunny Bates is the CEO of Red Thread, which works with the threads and people that shape the future. She is a founding board member of Kickstarter and Creative Capital and is on the TED brain trust. She shares a conversation she had with a new mother: “When she had a girl, everyone was, ‘Oh she’s so pretty, she’s so beautiful,’ and all these dresses came. Then when she had a boy, it was all about the San Francisco Giants and the future president of the United States. No one once said, ‘Oh he’s beautiful.’ No one once said, ‘Here’s your daughter, the future president of the United States.’ That’s where we go [mentally], and our society carries those presumptions forward as our kids grow.” Gender issues can also get lost in translation, metaphorically speaking. A study on immigrant girls growing up in the United States found that they thought women could not become president because of a classroom poster depicting all male presidents.[1]
How girls and women enter—and, unfortunately, often exit—the STEM education pipeline is the crux of the problem. There’s a need to increase their numbers and perseverance and strengthen all levels of STEM education for women and girls. In 2010, the Bayer Corporation ran a survey that found 40 percent of women and minority chemists and chemical engineers had been discouraged from pursuing their field, most often by college professors. The survey respondents identified three top factors that helped keep women and minorities from majoring in STEM: lack of quality science and math education programs in poorer school districts (75 percent), persistent stereotypes that say STEM isn’t for girls or minorities (66 percent), and financial issues related to the cost of education (53 percent).[2]
So how do innovating women get their start? Their introductions to the fields of business and STEM reflect a wide range of responses to girls who are curious and interested in pursuing knowledge normally thought of as “a boy thing” or “a man thing.”
Kristen Sanderson, consulting engineer at GE Energy Managements, said, “I have to credit my father for encouraging me early on. He always told me I could do anything without boundaries or restrictions. I don’t want to leave out my mom, who also encouraged me to become a professional. She went back to school and earned her accounting degree and went on to be a banker and CEO of our family construction business.” During high school, her father encouraged her to study computing. “I went to my university at registration and changed my major from pre-business to pre-engineering. I received my degree in computer science and went on to work on software system control centers for utility companies.”
Pam Barry is the cofounder and COO of the digital media and branding company Customerforce.com. She recalls, “My father suggested I had the aptitude to be a computer programmer. I was told by my career guidance counselor that I would be lucky if I could get a job as a computer operator, never mind programmer. My mother was furious with her, and my parents set out to help prove her wrong. At age seventeen, I took two aptitude tests for two different organizations and was offered a position with both as a programmer. Chose one of the offers and dropped my applications for university.”
And Evonne Heyning found herself caught in a squeeze play between parental support and inadequate educational resources in her district. Still, as a young girl, she helped change the system. “When we go to school for the first time, we start to differentiate ourselves from the others. We figure out that we are better at some things than others, and we form our identities and often our livelihoods based on those early ideas,” she said. “Early childhood was fantastic—it felt like a playground of possibilities. My dad would buy me tests to do, and I was reading the newspaper long before starting school with a fantastic first-year teacher in kindergarten. She fought for my right to compete and win math competitions and winked at me in the hallway when she saw me frowning. I started programming computers at the age of six, in 1981. My school had no idea what to do with a precocious prodigy who was learning algebra, exhibiting modernist art downtown, and asking for more work to do. My frustrated teacher sent me to the library, where they put me in front of the one computer they had in the school and gave me the spiral-bound book of BASIC. Heaven is no class and programming all afternoon!”
Heyning continues, “I enjoyed math, art, and natural hands-on learning opportunities and began to create books, games, and programs to share with teachers, counselors, and the principal. They took me to the state capitol building in Richmond, Virginia, and before my seventh birthday, I lobbied the state to put computers in every school. We won. At eight, I was asked to leave public school because they did not have any more resources to give me until middle school. As a geeky white girl growing up as a minority in the city, my parents were afraid what would happen if I skipped ahead again, so they found a scholarship for a private school where there were more resources for exploring my creative potential.” Heyning is now a cofounder at EDDEFY, which produces online tools for lifelong learning.
And Fiona Nielsen, the founder and CEO at DNAdigest.org, a nonprofit organization promoting and enabling mechanisms for efficient and secure sharing of genomics data for research, said that her early years were also a time of accelerated learning, but not through schools. “My introduction to the technical side of STEM came from my grandfather. He would tell me a lot about a lot of things, including archaeology and history, but he really caught my interest when he put me on his lap and showed me how he could type in the BASIC code from a computer magazine and turn it into a live game on his computer,” she said. “My grandfather was also the first person I know to have a personal website. He proudly showed me his website, hosted by some company in the United States because back then there were no Internet hosting companies in Denmark. Thanks to him, I was curious about the Internet, and I taught myself HTML and JavaScript from books I borrowed from the library to launch my own homepage back in 1996. In summary, all my main inspirations have come from outside of school and especially from ‘real world’ applications and from inspirational people.”
Natalie Panek, mission systems engineer at MDA Robotics and Automation, which produces Canadian robotics and other hardware for space exploration programs, feels that utilizing today’s social communication tools can help fight the stereotypes and peer pressure that keeps some girls from math and science. “Media is such a huge part of Gen Y—almost everything youth consumes is through their phones, Internet like YouTube, or television. We need to be providing access to amazing female role models through streams youth actually use. The Twitter world and other forms of social media are generally inundated with many hardships and challenges women in technology face. This negative perspective will not help inspire the next generation.” Panek spoke at TedxYouthToronto, demonstrating her love for the field. She added, “It’s like going on a first date; I’m not going to tell you all of my flaws right away. I am going to impress you with my most desirable traits first! So we must inspire and motivate first, then help build the skills women need to succeed and excel in the fields of STEM.”
Educational tracking can also be a bane to girls studying math and science. Xerox Chief Technology Officer Sophie Vandebroek shares her shock at finding out that at her daughter’s school, only one girl was put in the advanced math program, while her daughter and her friends were put in the regular level despite their achievements: “I called the other moms and we complained and then they put the girls back in advanced math. So even schools unconsciously put the girls into less scientific fields, and once you do that in the middle school, you lose them. So you have to really be on top of them. It was the same girls that got into advanced math in middle school that then ended up all getting into science, three of them engineers and the fourth one is now in medical school.”
[1] Lee L, “Understanding Gender Through Disney's Marriages: A Study of Young Korean Immigrant Girls,” Early Childhood Education Journal [serial online]. August 2008;36(1):11-18. Available from: Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson), Ipswich, MA.
[2] “Bayer Facts of Science Education XIV: Female and Minority Chemists and Chemical Engineers Speak About Diversity and Underrepresentation in STEM,” Executive Summary, Bayer Corporation, March 2010, 15, 21.