Steps ahead

Nitya and Anika both see themselves moving forward in the male-dominated field, confident that things will change by the time they are in graduate school.

“I think that the only way to break the gender gap is to get in when you’re the minority gender,” Nitya said. “I feel fine, because there are going to be enough women around me. By the time that I get a Ph.D., there will be a lot of women with me, because I think it’s changing.”

As a senior next year, Anika plans to take the CS advanced topics courses Expert Systems and Computer Architecture, as well as the advanced mathematics topics courses Differential Equations 2 and Signals and Systems.

“I think within a decade we’ll definitely have a lot more women in higher positions in STEM, and having those leaders as examples will provide yet another push for women to enter the fields,” she said. “Once the fields start evening out, I’m confident that they’ll progress until they reach equilibrium, however long that may take.”

Female alumni have gone on to success in STEM fields. Forbes’ 2014 “30 Under 30” list in science and health care featured Surbhi Sarna (‘03), who founded nVision Medical, a technology intended to improve ovarian cancer detection. Currently, several of the most prominent Bay Area tech companies are led by female Chief Executive Officers such as Susan Wojcicki of Youtube, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, and Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard. Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, and Marissa Mayer declined an interview with The Winged Post.

Women currently in the industries foresee an influx of women entering STEM fields in the next five to ten years. For Emily Banks, lead mobile news editor of the Wall Street Journal and previous managing editor of Mashable, her introduction to tech began in the midst of her career at Mashable when she analyzed traffic to the site and learned programming. With the increased relevance and use of coding skills today, Banks sees more women taking these roles on, though change may be slow.

 “We’ll still see more and more women stepping across the gap from the “softer” tech fields fully into tech, but they may be like me, without any formal (as of yet) STEM training,” she said. “They’ll be like my Journal colleague who previously managed the daily news production of the iPad app and crossed over to the tech side to be a product manager. But these roles as hugely important. Having these women pave the way means a more welcome workplace for women who choose to major in tech fields too.”

At Harker, Head of Academics Jennifer Gargano said she has explored some of the existing opportunities or initiative organizations that the Upper School currently has in order to improve any imbalance, including WiSTEM (Women in STEM), which was created 10 years ago to address female underrepresentation in higher-level math and science classes.

Improvement, according to her, is still on the agenda moving forward.

“I think we have a lot of really accomplished females in those areas. Why wouldn’t we want to push forward those efforts?” Gargano said. “We can do better, and we should do better.”

This piece was originally published in the pages of WingSpan on January 28, 2015.