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High school girls from around the country come to ask questions of researcher Katie Bowman at the annual Women in STEM program at Caltech in Pasadena.
Scholarships For Women In Stem Fields In Silicon Valley, California
In the auditorium, hundreds of high school students from all over the country warmed up to the YouTube idols they wanted to emulate.
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In front of them, Kathy Bowman, an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics, electrical engineering and astronomy at Caltech in Pasadena, showed a picture of a glowing black hole with a fiery halo. In 2022, Bowman led a team of more than 300 scientists from 80 institutions to take the world’s first image of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Bowman’s lecture, part of Caltech’s Women in STEM program, had a deeper purpose: It featured a pioneering female scientist who helped envision how girls can join one of the world’s leading science and technology institutions. . These hard, strategic campaign efforts have paid off.
In an important breakthrough, more than half of Caltech’s incoming students this fall will be women for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated the first women admitted as undergraduates in 1970.
“It means a place for young women where we can represent them and their experiences…where they can grow and succeed and become truly impactful, unique scientists and engineers and continue to have impact. It’s a really research-intensive career,” said Ashley. Pally, chief admissions officer.
Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics
Kathy Bowman, the scientist who took the first photo of a black hole, spoke to high school girls at Caltech’s annual STEM program.
Gloria L. Blackwell, CEO of the American Assn. University Women hailed Caltech’s success as an important step forward in closing the large gender gap in the fields of science, engineering and mathematics. While women hold about 60 percent of degrees in biological sciences, they hold only 18 percent in computer science and 20 percent in engineering, Blackwell said.
Research shows that boys do better in math and science than girls, but persistent societal messages say otherwise—specifically, that Latino and black girls face discrimination and lack role models, resources, and opportunities that prevent them from pursuing fields these. , says the AAUW.
Caltech waives the requirements for high school students in calculus, chemistry, and physics and offers other ways to demonstrate knowledge in these areas.
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Caltech is not the first institution to achieve gender equality in STEM. Harvey Mudd College, a small private institution in Claremont, was an early leader in diversity and a key focus of former president Maria Clave, a computer scientist and mathematician who resigned last year after 17 years in office. For the first time in the university’s history, in 2010 there were more women than men, and in 2014 there were more women than men in engineering education. Today, women represent 52.8 percent in computer science, 50.5 percent in engineering, and 68.2 percent in mathematics and computational biology.
At UC Berkeley, another strong producer of STEM graduates, nearly half of students in the field identify as female or non-binary, but the fields of entry vary widely. They make up more than two-thirds of students in biology and biomedicine, but about a third of students in engineering, computing and information technology, mathematics and statistics.
Caltech is expanding its women’s STEM program, welcoming 500 high school girls this month as it achieves gender parity for the first time in the institution’s 133-year history.
For Caltech, a campus of 2,400 undergraduate and graduate students, home to 47 Nobel Prize winners and more than 50 research centers, the road to gender equality is long. Women were not admitted until 1970, amid growing demands for gender equality and two years before Congress passed Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which banned gender discrimination in all federally funded educational programs.
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Louise Kirkbride was one of 32 members of that inaugural class. Kirkbridge, a qualified Caltech junior from Philadelphia and a National Honor Roll finalist, left her home in Pasadena without her parents’ permission and support to attend Kirkbridge College. Kirkbride said university officials picked him up at LAX, gave him a full scholarship and helped him become an independent minor.
“I think Caltech is the toughest school in the world, and that just makes it irresistible,” Kirkbride said.
On the first day, she said, some of the male students held signs that read “Goodbye, Kotex,” a reference to the tampon brand. He wisely endured a student who well explained “why accepting [women] as a positive measure should be good” according to the natural division of the sexes. One professor told her that admitting women to her class will end Caltech’s excellence, and another told her, “You’re a waste of an education.”
But the kindness and support of another professor, Carver Mead, helped him find a home at Caltech. He was so inspired by it that he followed his path and became an electrical engineer.
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Led by graduate student Radhika Bhatt, she introduced the lab to high school girls during Caltech’s annual Women in STEM program.
Now 90, Mead, who still conducts research as a professor of technology and applied science, says she has always supported women scientists. “I’ve always had women in research groups who are more collaborative and often provide a lot of leadership in a very quiet way, and that just changes things,” she said.
At a professors’ conference discussing the subject in 1967, Mead complained that many “old farts” thought women were too self-conscious, that they should just get married and have children, and that “we can educate people we want.” Science. He left the meeting and turned to a MIT woman he knew. He told her that there was no problem being a minority on the campus of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mead returned, told her colleagues her “data points” and, convinced by the evidence, the researchers voted to include the women.
When Bowman arrived at Caltech as a faculty member in 2019, much had changed. Growing up in Indiana, his father, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biological engineering at Purdue University, often encouraged him to pursue his talents in science and mathematics. But as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, she was one of the few women in the electrical engineering department and sometimes felt like an impostor.
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“It starts to go to your head a little, but if you’re not looking for it, you move on and it doesn’t bother you,” said Bowman, 35. “I really try to put the glasses on.”
He graduated summa cum laude from Michigan, earned a PhD from MIT, where he began working on black hole imaging in 2013, and then earned a PhD from Harvard University. There, in 2019, he helped develop the code to take the world’s first photo of a black hole and unexpectedly became the face of an international project on social media. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) hailed her as “an inspiration to all Americans, especially young women and girls” with STEM aspirations. The children sent their drawings of black holes. A girl even dressed as him for Halloween.
Bowman said she never made the decision to become a model, but she recognizes the importance of girls seeing women in science. After the lecture, a girl approached him, asked for a selfie and told him, “You are the scientist of my dreams!” say
UC Berkeley has announced plans to open a 36-acre space center at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley to create new opportunities in the rapidly growing field.
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Leah Cevallos, a senior at West Sacramento High School, said the science journals she reads are “interesting” and dominated by men, so it’s refreshing to see Buma focus on breaking the black hole.
“The more you give people a chance to see themselves in a place like Caltech, the more we find great people who can make great contributions to science and technology,” Michel Efros said. In 1994, he was invited to join Caltech’s electronic engineering department.
Palley, the director of admissions, said she doubled the size of the Women in STEM program to 500 girls and extended it to two days so prospective students and their families could get a more in-depth experience at Caltech, especially through lab visits.
