About half of today’s entire workforce, 48%, is comprised of women according to the most recent U.S. census. But, women only make up 24% of the STEM workforce. This lack of female brainpower in the STEM fields can be traced back to high school, where boys are 6x more likely to take a STEM class in high school than girls. Why is there such an extreme lack of women in fields such as math, science, engineering, and computer science? Sarah Hand decided to take a look into these statistics for her senior thesis.

As students, namely women, go through their schooling years, there is a progressive falling off of the path towards a STEM profession, commonly known as the leaky pipeline. The biggest drop-offs are early in education, for example, recruitment in high school. Studies have shown evidence for a confidence gap, meaning that women are much less confident in their abilities in STEM when compared to men, which may lead to them not pursuing STEM fields. To relate this data to her group of participants, Sarah asked, what are AMHS teachers’ and students’ gender perceptions regarding STEM fields? Interestingly enough, her data aligned with the research she had found regarding women in STEM fields, that teachers’ and students’ exhibit explicit bias, a belief that males are better at STEM than females and that females are better at non-STEM fields, and a confidence gap among students, females are less confident in their math and science abilities than the males. Sarah took this as an opportunity to implement more gender-balanced teaching initiatives, and will be discussing these initiatives with Ms. Peterson. In addition, she has a plethora of possible interventions to fix these biases that both students and teachers hold. Hopefully, with the help of Sarah’s thesis, AMHS will be able to move towards an equal opportunity school for males and females alike and will encourage women to pursue their STEM related passions, if they are so inclined.

Congratulations, Sarah!