Girls in STEM: Answering the Call for STEM Skills in Our Global Workforce
by Margie Wang, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer,
JA Worldwide
Skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) offer young people the best opportunities for high-income jobs. At the same time, the global need for workers equipped with STEM skills grows more desperate, with millions of positions going unfilled each year.
The answer? Look to the half of the world’s population that is sorely underrepresented in high-paying STEM fields: women and girls.
A STEM-Savvy Workforce: The Need Keeps Growing
According to Manpower Group’s annual Talent Shortage Survey, today’s second-hardest position to fill, worldwide, is engineering. The UK faces a shortfall of 40,000 STEM graduates every year. For Sub-Saharan Africa to improve sanitation and access to safe water — one of the UN Global Goals — they will need millions of engineers. And in the United States, STEM jobs are growing three times as fast as non-STEM jobs.
Clearly, we have a global need for STEM skills, not only to ensure each young person’s economic success but also to enable the success of entire communities, countries, and continents.
Why Are Girls and Women Opting Out?
Girls and women aren’t opting out of STEM completely. Within STEM fields, women tend to gravitate toward social sciences (where 58 percent are women) and biological sciences (48 percent women), but those areas have fewer jobs available, offer lower pay, and often require more schooling than other STEM areas do. Among the higher-demand, higher-paying, 4-year-degree STEM fields — for example, engineering — women make up only 13 percent. In some disciplines, such as electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, are well under 10 percent.
In computer science, degrees awarded to women have fallen from 37 percent in the late 1980s to 15 percent today. And in this year’s list of the highest-paying careers for students graduating with a four-year degree, 27 of the 30 jobs are in engineering, math, and computer science, while only 1 of the 30 is in social or biological sciences.
When we group engineering, computer science, and physics together, the numbers become even more troubling for women. Eighty percent of graduates in these three areas are men. Once in the workplace, 89 percent are men. That means nearly 50 percent of female graduates in engineering, computer science, and physics either never enter the job market or drop out soon after they get there.
Why is it that girls and women opt out of high-paying STEM fields? In a 2010 report, Girl Scouts of the USA studied why so few girls enter STEM fields, in spite of showing both interest and aptitude at a young age:
The GSUSA data is for the U.S. only, and may not apply entirely to girls worldwide. But the research certainly rings true for me. With a programmer dad and a mom who worked outside the home at a time when few moms did, my parents taught my sister and me that we could do anything a boy could do. I was good at science and math, so I took calculus in high school, and my teacher encouraged me to join the Math Club. There, gender didn’t come into play: boys sometimes did better than girls at math meets, but just as often, girls did better than boys.
What also rings true for me are young women who graduate in STEM fields, but then leave the field and work in other areas. A 2011 National Science Foundation study examined why women either don’t enter their chosen engineering fields upon graduating or leave the field once they start working, and gives us a list of issues to solve for:
The Need for Big Solutions
People and organizations are thinking big, trying to solve for the objections that keep girls and women from working in high-paying STEM fields. One example is Girls Who Code, which Reshma Saujani started in New York City with a group of 20 girls who were mentored for a summer in programming languages. Four years later, the organization has 10,000 girls in 42 states.
Other examples come from my fellow panelists, who presented their world-changing ideas today at the WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions:
- Humanyze will study behavioral differences between men and women to understand bias that keeps women out of the STEM pipeline.
- Manpower will increase work opportunities for women, raise the consciousness of employees, and address the needs of women in the workplace.
- Johnson Controls will leverage innovation labs and incubators, and provide fellowships for women in STEM fields.
- AnthroTronix will invest in STEAM (adding “arts” to STEM), make a cultural shift with the maker movement, and figure out how to scale their efforts.
- The New York Academy of Sciences has launched “1000 girls, 1000 futures,” with an ambition to reach one million girls by 2020.
The JA Moonshot
These big ideas represent real solutions — a “moonshot” akin to launching a spacecraft to the moon for the first time, and I applaud each one.
Now it’s my turn, because today’s discussion required each panelist to suggest a unique moonshot. What’s our big idea for radically increasing the number of girls and women immersed in STEM skills and careers? To provide holistic, reinforcing support for girls, starting from the time they first enter a JA program, and continuing through vocational school or higher education, into internships and job opportunities, and throughout their careers.
- First impact: Imagine a girl, 15 years old, living in Romania, Ghana, or the United States, who signs up for JA STEM Day, a fun opportunity build complex paper structures, design a candy-shooting catapult, and learn basic coding. The girl discovers that one of her female mentors is a computer engineer, and they talk about her work.
- Subsequent JA experiences(s): The girl then competes in a two-day JA STEM Innovation Challenge, during which her team solves an assigned social problem: reuse and redirect water into drought-stricken areas. She’s mentored by the volunteer she met at JA STEM Day.
- The JA Company Program: After her team wins the JA STEM Innovation Challenge, they begin participating in the JA Company Program, where they write a business plan and begin sourcing local vendors for their product. The team wins their local Company of the Year competition and heads to their national competition. Although they don’t take home the top prize, the team has learned not only vital business skills, but also critical soft skills, like how to present and persuade, how to get along with people with different styles of working and learning, and how to overcome challenges as they arise.
- Scholarships; internships: Our girl and her volunteer mentor work with JA to set up a summer coding camp with the result that, two years later, our girl is an accomplished coder, with a number of teachers and corporate mentors in her corner. She applies for a JA college scholarship, knowing that earning the scholarship means committing to volunteering as a JA mentor for at least five years after her college graduation. While in college, she applies for an internship program at a JA corporate partner that sets aside three fulltime job openings for top JA interns.
- Ongoing career support: Our girl — now a woman — finishes her degree program with honors, gets hired at the company, and is mentored for the challenges ahead. Because of her employer’s pledge to expand hiring of women in STEM, nearly half of the engineers and coders at her workplace are women. Some leave their jobs to raise their children and are invited back when they’re ready to return to the workplace. Some prefer part-time hours. Others don’t have children, or opt to stay in their jobs while they do, yet find equal levels of work-life balance. She also sees women being promoted and earning equal pay for equal responsibilities and experience as their male counterparts.
- Giving back to refill the pipeline: Excited to complete her five-year commitment to mentor young JA students, she begins working with JA to plan a STEM Day event, where she meets a girl of 15, who joins JA in an after-school program. A virtuous cycle!
Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps. But our new partnership with Johnson & Johnson (J&J) makes me believe it’s entirely possible.
Why Our Moonshot May Take Flight
Our J&J partnership falls under its WiSTEM2D (women in science, technology, engineering, math, manufacturing and design) initiative, through which J&J is teaming up with FHI 360 and JA Worldwide to reach one million girls by 2020. The initiative is led by women, who mentor girls in early education; creates a path for vocational school or higher ed; provides a bridge to employment; and supports professional women at J&J. JA’s focus for the initiative is on building in-school and after-school curricula that pairs students with J&J mentors and build students’ STEM skills, with a laser focus on being job-ready.
What sets J&J apart is its holistic approach. J&J is attacking the problem along the entire pipeline: primary school through high school, university and professional support owned by their women scientists, engineers, and business leaders.
We’re especially excited about how JA can make a difference in this partnership. Our proven curriculum, global reach, and experiential learning environment are uniquely positioned not only to tap a girl’s natural interest in STEM and provide her with the mentorship she needs to thrive, but also to prepare her with the soft skills that are so often lacking in STEM candidates. In “The Global STEM Paradox,” FSG and The New York Academy of Sciences cite an overemphasis on rote learning in STEM graduates, which leads to either unenthusiastic grads who set their sights on other fields or applicants lacking soft skills who are, therefore, unable to get a job even in the best of markets. JA hands-on approach goes beyond academics to teach collaboration, creativity, self-confidence, resiliency, and perseverance — critical skills that, when coupled with STEM skills, create leaders who can solve human and social problems.
JA also has a long history of partnering with worldwide corporations, many of whom specialize in the STEM arena. In addition to our global partnership with Johnson & Johnson, we’re working with CISCO Networking Academy to introduce STEM qualifications to schools, along with JA soft skills. A pilot is underway in Peru, with plans to take this to other countries in the Americas, where STEM skills are especially needed. In a similar partnership with SAP, we introduce coding and design along with soft skills. Throughout the world, we partner with Bechtel, Alcoa, GE, ExxonMobil, Intel, and other companies to deliver the JA STEM Innovation Challenge, through which high school students solve a social problem using STEM skills. This, specifically, is what girls are asking for — the connection to helping people and making the world better — before they can see themselves in STEM fields.
JA is expert at bringing together students teachers, schools, and corporations. If we’re able — with the help of teachers and corporate partners — to see our moonshot come to fruition, we’ll help ensure that both halves of the worldwide population are available to solve the toughest challenges we face.
