Imagine a scientist. What comes to your mind? An old man in disheveled hair, wearing a labcoat, brooding over something? Excellent. You did what 98% of people do when asked to imagine a scientist. Now imagine an engineer. Do you see a middle-aged man in an architect hat with engineering drawings and tools in hand? Good. Do you also see what’s wrong with this vision? It’s implicitly biased. It’s a fixed idea in our heads of who should be an engineer and who should be a scientist. As a female engineering student, the gender-bias of that vision seems a bit out of hand to me.

Now you may ask what’s wrong with the implicit bias anyway? What’s wrong is that the image of a man working in technical fields greatly bars young girls from entering into the field in the first place. Despite repeated research which shows girls outperforming boys in STEM subjects the question that stays is what stops girls from pursuing what they’re good at. I knew the answer was lack of representation but it took me a while to totally understand its implications.

Our team has a Scientific Society wing through which we represent science among growing students in schools and high schools. We hold interactive sessions to focus upon the growing need of science and technology in our society and to convince students to think beyond the obvious. As girls in the male dominated engineering fields and the male dominated team we took it upon us to represent women in engineering but we realized that mental conditioning is afflicted on young girls since quite an early age. In all these visits I saw a consistent pattern of lack of interest of young girls in physics or mathematics or engineering. I have interacted with girls of all ages and I noticed a trend of girls wanting to be teachers or doctors but never engineers or pilots or technicians as the boys wanted to. When I talk about racing or formula cars, the only people in the room to really feel the excitement are boys who quote Need for Speed, Dirt Rally or Asphalt as the video games they grew up playing. Something as simple as the type of toys girls or boys are provided to play with is vastly affecting academic priorities of students. Girls being mentally tuned into choosing fields that are more ‘womanly’ aka more delicate and less laborious, is really taking toll over even the women who are given freedom to choose their career later in lives.

Now what happens when fewer women continue to opt for STEM fields and fewer still for STEM professions? The situation becomes misrepresented and unsymmetrical. It conveniently encourages the majority group to flock together and create a personal comfort zone in which women feel excluded. It leads to propagation of false, stereotypical notions and syndromes like the Matilda effect. It leads to problems like gender pay gap and women unemployment in research and practical work. It leads to the few remaining women to feel more disempowered and more pressurized to succumb to majority opinions and thus suffer from lack of self-esteem. It’s a vicious cycle that most people refuse to recognize. It’s the Women in Stem crisis that is real and shows up in the way only 2 women have received a Nobel Prize in Physics since Marie Curie. Or the way we don’t know about women astronomers like Caroline Herschel or Maria Mitchell. Or how Rachel Carson was mostly shunned during her early career. Or the way we don’t know how Cecilia’s or Mileva’s contributions were mostly overwritten in the folds of history.

As a female student in a university that has a whopping 90% majority of men, I can say that the struggle is real. We still need to put in relatively more effort to validate our professional credibility and work through constraints like time restrictions and family obligations. We still struggle with stereotypical ideas, pertaining to engineering itself, common in the society and in the institute. We still feel the need to prove ourselves as equal counterparts of the male students and not be labelled, categorized or sexualised. But what I know is that it’s an ongoing struggle; we need to keep stomping our rainboots everytime we emerge out of the storm of social backlash and we need to keep being loud and clear to make space for us and the girls who will reach for the skies in the years to come.