District 214 students, staff work to close STEM gender gap

When Nancy Suarez heard that Elk Grove High School would be offering a section of Intro to Engineering for girls only this school year, she dropped lunch hour from her schedule and rearranged her other classes to get in.

Now she goes through each day without a lunch break, but Suarez, a sophomore at Elk Grove, said the confidence she's gained make the long days worth it.

“When we don't have boys around we don't have as much pressure, and we realize we can handle this,” Suarez said. “It's less intimidating and we all help each other succeed.”

If she had to be one of a few girls surrounded by boys in an engineering class, Suarez said she would speak up less for fear of getting a question wrong, or more likely, she never would have enrolled in the class in the first place.

Suarez and the 16 other girls in the Intro to Engineering class are part of a pilot program to get more female students interested in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. It's just one way that students and staff at Northwest Suburban High School District 214 are working to close the gender gap.

“We had all these girls coming in with great math scores, but not enrolling in these classes,” said Elk Grove High Associate Principal Kyle Burritt. “We talked with parents and kids to see if there was an interest and there was, but they still weren't enrolling, so we decided to try something new. There's such a need for women in these fields so we want to inspire them to take the leap.”

Counselors at Elk Grove targeted students based on high math scores and career interest surveys, and invited them to enroll in the pilot program, Burritt said.

The curriculum is the same as all other sections of Intro to Engineering, but the smaller class size and encouraging atmosphere can make all the difference, students said. Teachers also bring in female college students and professional engineers to talk to the class about their experiences.

“We wanted to make sure that if you indeed have an interest, there wasn't some kind of barrier being put up by the school and that you could have the opportunity. We didn't want there to be that intimidation factor,” Burritt said.

The class has even changed students' minds on what they want to do in the future.

Lily Lawrin, a junior, was planning to become a teacher or a dentist after high school. But after being part of the all-girls class, she said she has fallen in love with engineering and will pursue it as a career.

“Whenever you think of an engineer, you think of old dirty guys in a manufacturing plant, you never think of girls doing it,” Lawrin said.

“This has opened up a whole new area for me that I never would have done otherwise.”

Burritt said students have given good feedback on the class so far and the school is planning to offer the all-girls section again next year.

“Gender roles are kind of defined by the time they get to this period in their lives,” Burritt said. “So we said, 'Let's make sure social norms don't define this class.' If we can create a comfort level and find a way to inspire them, there's no harm in that.” The course has had ripple effects outside the classroom. The school participates in a robot rumble competition districtwide, and for the first time this year Elk Grove will have an all-female team in the competition.

Teachers aren't the only ones trying to make a difference.

Lauren Anfenson and Veronica Boratyn are two of only 10 girls on the 70-member WildStang robotics team, a nationally-recognized squad that draws students from Wheeling, Rolling Meadows and Prospect high schools.

“We noticed there was a large disparity between the number of boys on our team and the number of girls,” said Boratyn, a junior at Prospect.

The two teamed up to inspire a new generation of girls with the Miss Maker Fair earlier this month. The fair was a hands-on workshop for more than 30 area middle school girls to expose them to different kinds of engineering.

The day was structured around three different types of engineering that go into building a robot — mechanical, electrical and computer programming — with high school students teaching younger students.

Anfenson and Boratyn had been organizing the event since last March, and spent hundreds of hours planning activities for the girls that would be interesting, getting sponsors to donate materials, going to middle schools to get girls to sign up, and training their classmates on how to run the workshop. Now that it's over, Anfenson and Boratyn are already ready to plan the next Miss Maker Fair.

Their goal: to get girls interested in engineering and confident in their skills at a young age.

“There's a certain stigma. I think it's lack of information,” Boratyn said, of why more girls aren't involved in STEM activities.

“It can be kind of intimidating to join because it's such a boys club,” Anfenson agreed. “You really have to push to break through that barrier, but once you do it's really rewarding and fun.”

It's not that there isn't an interest, said Mark Koch, WildStang coach. Within four days, all spots in the Miss Maker Fair were filled.

But, somewhere between middle school and high school girls lose interest.

“I think girls are really interested in science and math when they are younger, but when they get older it becomes a more stigmatized thing,” Anfenson said. “They are almost discouraged from doing it.”

Officials agree, which is why Burritt is reaching out to eighth-grade students at feeder schools to get them interested in the all-girl class at Elk Grove, and why Koch is encouraging his team to keep reaching out to middle schoolers with activities like the Miss Maker Fair.

“We need to get to kids before high school,” Koch said. “By high school it's almost too late to get girls excited about science and engineering because they've already formulated things in their minds about what it's like.”

But with programs like those at District 214, officials and students are hoping that the gender gap in STEM will continue to lessen over the next few years.

“It's like a cycle, if more girls join then even more will want to be a part of it,” Suarez said. “I hope.”