Fighting Barriers in STEM Careers for Women

STEM careers offer premier growth and earnings, but there are some barriers that women face when pursuing STEM careers. One such example is the gender wage gap where women earn approximately 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man. With STEM careers specifically, men earn a 40% higher salary than women.

Although women’s representation in STEM has increased dramatically since 1970, those strides have leveled off in recent years. In fact, the number of women working in computer fields — the largest-growing STEM field — dropped 7 percentage points from 1990 to 2016.

Barriers and what to do about them

There has been substantial progress towards gender equality in education and employment over the last 50 years. Women have gained access to the same educational and career opportunities as men, and are well-represented in many fields.

Survey respondents listed the following as the top challenges they face:

Weak professional network

Inadequate on-the-job training or professional development opportunities

Underutilized engineering skills

Work culture and job demands that compete with family and/or community responsibilities

Fewer opportunities for field work than colleagues

Feeling disrespected and undervalued by managers and/or co-workers

Thankfully, there has been an increase in programming that showcases girls and women in STEM. For example, the movie Hidden Figures features three inspiring Black women from different STEM fields. The film shows how their talents came together to put the first man on the moon.

Enjoy below a truly inspiring message.

Close your eyes and picture and engineer. You probably weren’t envisioning Debbie Sterling. Debbie Sterling is an engineer and founder of GoldieBlox, a toy company out to inspire the next generation of female engineers. She has made it her mission in life to tackle the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math.

GoldieBlox is a book series+construction set that engages kids to build through the story of Goldie, the girl inventor who solves problems by building simple machines. Debbie writes and illustrates Goldie’s stories, taking inspiration from her grandmother, one of the first female cartoonists and creator of “”Mr. Magoo.”” Her company, launched in 2012, raised over $285,000 in 30 days through Kickstarter, and has been featured in numerous publications such as The Atlantic and Forbes.

Prior to founding GoldieBlox, Debbie served as the Marketing Director of Lori Bonn, a national jewelry company. For the past 7 years, she has also served as a brand strategy consultant for a wide variety of organizations including Microsoft, T-Mobile, Organic Valley and the New York Knicks.

Debbie’s inspiration to create a mission-driven company came in 2008, when she spent 6 months volunteering at a grassroots nonprofit in rural India. She created a viral fundraising campaign called “”I Want a Goat,”” raising over $30,000 for economic and educational development in the region. This experience helped pave the way to finding her true passion: inspiring the next generation of female engineers.

Debbie completed her degree in engineering at Stanford (Product Design, ’05) and currently lives with her husband in San Francisco.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)