[Applause]
last week I went to an event hosted by
the University of Waterloo for accepted
students to their software engineering
program as I walked into the room
excited to see the people I would be
spending the next four years with there
were 18 students already there and all
of them were male throughout the
remainder of the event I continued to be
the only female student there and while
I never felt excluded you do feel a
little bit out of place a little less
likely to start a conversation or to
join into a discussion and as a female
student competing in stem this is not an
isolated incident it’s something you see
everywhere whether it’s in a crowded
lecture hall for a computer science
competition where there are only seven
other girls while writing a physics
contest or even in my AP calculus class
it’s this kind of discrepancy that made
us want to study both the causes and the
effects of it and that led to this
project even when girls are given the
opportunity to get involved in stem
through affirmative action programs or
outreach programs their experiences are
often invalidated this past summer I was
lucky enough to be able to attend a
summer program for computer science at
MIT and even though it was one of the
most amazing experiences in my life I
learned so much and I felt really
validated by being in an environment
where I felt comfortable around stem
when I came back and told other people
about my experience a lot of the time
the reaction was negative they
automatically assumed that because the
program was a female program it wasn’t
as competitive or as challenging as
other similar programs and what that did
was it made me feel negatively about an
experience that should have been a
positive memory about stem at the same
time all three of us are students at the
University of Toronto schools a school
that admits equal numbers of girls and
boys at least in part based on STEM
proficiency in the form of a math test
and because of this a lot of people
assume that UTS doesn’t have a gender
gap issue in stem in the grade 7
classroom there are equal numbers of
girls and boys and even though this is
the case but something
that participation does not predict is
either experience or performance for
these grade seven girls in the math
class that are in equal numbers as boys
do they still have the same experience
did they feel as good in the classroom
do they raise their hand as much did
they enjoy the class as much and do they
perform as other male counterparts did
they get as they do as well in math
competitions did they go on to pursue
careers in math these are all questions
that we wanted to address in our
research our research question is what
social factors at our school contribute
to a gender disparity in STEM
competition results we’re studying this
because we know that female students are
participating in and succeeding in all
of our standard courses and that there’s
no inherent biological advantage for
male students but in those upper
echelons of stem competition there’s a
huge gender disparity now we know that
gender is a spectrum and also because it
would be a huge generalization to say
that all female students have had one
experience and all male students have
had another experience but what we’re
noticing ultimately is that there is an
ingrained preference for masculinity and
male traits in STEM environments and an
ingrained underestimation of femaleness
and female traits we began our study by
looking at the stem pipeline so all the
way from younger classes and younger
students where there tends to be a bit
more gender parity until stem
professionals where women make up only
about a quarter of the stem workplace we
then found this 2010 study by Ellison
and Swanson that showed the gender gap
on both the SAT math and on the AMC 12
which is a very high-level math
competition as you can see although at
lower percentiles so at below average
and average female and male students
perform about as well as each other as
you get to the highest percentile levels
the rate of females drops dramatically
for instance at the 99th percentile
level only 14% of those achievers are
female and the top forty six students
who wrote the contest were all-male we
wanted to look at the fact that a this
is not just due to participation rates
as for instance on the SAT math a
hundred thousand students write it then
male students
and for the AMC 12 although the rate is
slightly smaller it’s not nearly enough
to account for the 14% discovered the
14% level we also wanted to ignore
theories of predisposition or innate
ability because this has been
discredited in multiple studies showing
that it is more of a societal factor
that causes female students to under
in addition we wanted to study what it
would be with different STEM fields so
while this study only looked at math we
have seen that the gender gap is closing
much more quickly in areas such as
biology than it is in others such as
computer science where it’s almost
stagnating and we wanted to study super
elite schools
so although the boys in this study came
from a wide variety of schools all over
half of the female students came from
only 20 super elite schools our school
UTS as Amy mentioned earlier could be
considered one of those super elite
schools and we wanted to study what the
gender gap would be like here for if it
exists strongly here it must as well and
many other areas when we wanted we
wanted to look at a variety of different
math contests over the past eight years
and the Honorables of all of these math
contests and science contests to see how
UTS students did in terms of gender
discrepancy the first type of contest
that we wanted to look at were math
contests which at UTS are definitely the
most common type of contest taken what
we saw was across the 12 different
contests that we looked at there was a
really similar rate of female presence
in the honor roll around 30% and this is
especially troubling for contests like
for example the Gauss grade 7 which is
mandatory for all students and therefore
has equal participation rates of girls
and boys and yet it still only had a 27
percent rate of female presence in the
Honor Roll suggesting a really large
discrepancy even at such a young age as
Amanda was mentioning earlier there are
differences among the different STEM
fields for example for physics over the
past eight years there have been 17 UTS
students who have made the cap exam on a
roll the cap exam is a competitive
physics contest in throughout Canada
out of the 17 students who made the
honor roll only one was a girl
conversely as you can see with biology
even though there is a little bit of a
gender discrepancy it’s nowhere near as
severe for the top 170 competitors on
the national biology competition
forty-five percent were girls however
another worrying trend that we see here
is as we go up in percentile rankings so
as we look at the top 1% of competitors
for the NBC this number decreases to 41%
so at higher percentile levels girls are
doing worse even in fields like biology
where there’s pretty close to equal
numbers of girls and boys another field
that we could see this in was computer
science and for the computer science
contests we look at looked at three main
contests the junior CCC the senior CCC
both of which are qualifying contests
for the CCO or the Canadian computing
Olympiad and what we saw here was
already at the CCC level the rate of
female presence on the Honor Roll is
extremely low for the junior CCC it was
only 17% and for the senior it was even
lower at 14% but as we get to that
highest level of competition the
Canadian computing Olympiad we saw that
rate decreased dramatically so over the
past eight years 14 UTS students have
made the CCO honor roll and out of those
14 students 0 were girls what this
really does is highlight what we’re
trying to say here today which is that
even at a school that’s as competitive
and interesting as UTS that emits equal
numbers and girls and boys and tries to
give them the same type of education and
the same tools to succeed in the STEM
environment we have such a large
discrepancy misconceptions of what
female women in stem of all the female
women in stem are common and they exist
in a cycle so prejudices are
internalized and then they’re taught and
we’re not attributing any of this to the
prejudice or misogyny of any individual
but again it’s a cycle and we think that
a lot of these preconceptions come from
ideas of who a woman in stem is so who
they are socially what they look like
and what careers they might go into and
we do think that this changes the type
of encouragement that
answer given we’ve identified a few
different ways that we think are simple
but also can go a long long way in terms
of remedying this this huge problem with
disparity so first of all female role
models we think that having a diverse
group of female role models is really
going to be important for a changing
those preconceptions of what different
STEM careers are like and what people in
stem are like and what women in stem are
like and also there was a study done in
2012 that proves that women actually
female students it’s especially
important for them to have role models
and people that they can look up to now
second of all talking about programs
that are essentially affirmative action
like the ones that Amy did that are need
to be distinguished and need to be
recognized as just as competitive as
their co-ed and male counterparts and
third teaching methods so there was
actually a study done in 2015 by Simon
at Elle and in it they talked about
different teaching methods that are
ideal for different types of students
now we know that in STEM environments in
most stem classrooms one thing that can
be hugely advantageous to a student and
a huge skill is the ability to just take
a problem and not necessarily know at
the beginning if you’re able to figure
it out but be able to work through it
and I’ll alternate lis get to the end of
it now this is great and this is
absolutely a huge skill but what about
students who don’t have that confidence
right off the bat that maybe would
rather be shown how to do something
first so they can be confident that they
know that that method can work and then
they’re 100% able to complete it after
that so that’s one of the one of those
kinds of methods that if we’re just more
open to these kinds of different
teaching methods and different ways that
students like to learn in our
comfortable learning it’s ultimately
going to make stem a much more inclusive
environment because remember ultimately
we’re learning in an environment that
was designed with masculinity in mind
regardless of who exactly is
participating in it and all the
prejudices of any specific person in it
here our goal is to make sure that
anyone can walk into a stem classroom
and make sure that they don’t feel
excluded or isolated but rather
empowered and capable having more female
students in stem is going to create a
positive feedback loop
students of all genders are going to
lead to leaders of all genders and this
in turn inspires the next generation we
really hope that this talk today has
inspired initiatives towards meaningful
gender equality both at our school and
beyond
thank you
[Applause]
last week I went to an event hosted by
the University of Waterloo for accepted
students to their software engineering
program as I walked into the room
excited to see the people I would be
spending the next four years with there
were 18 students already there and all
of them were male throughout the
remainder of the event I continued to be
the only female student there and while
I never felt excluded you do feel a
little bit out of place a little less
likely to start a conversation or to
join into a discussion and as a female
student competing in stem this is not an
isolated incident it’s something you see
everywhere whether it’s in a crowded
lecture hall for a computer science
competition where there are only seven
other girls while writing a physics
contest or even in my AP calculus class
it’s this kind of discrepancy that made
us want to study both the causes and the
effects of it and that led to this
project even when girls are given the
opportunity to get involved in stem
through affirmative action programs or
outreach programs their experiences are
often invalidated this past summer I was
lucky enough to be able to attend a
summer program for computer science at
MIT and even though it was one of the
most amazing experiences in my life I
learned so much and I felt really
validated by being in an environment
where I felt comfortable around stem
when I came back and told other people
about my experience a lot of the time
the reaction was negative they
automatically assumed that because the
program was a female program it wasn’t
as competitive or as challenging as
other similar programs and what that did
was it made me feel negatively about an
experience that should have been a
positive memory about stem at the same
time all three of us are students at the
University of Toronto schools a school
that admits equal numbers of girls and
boys at least in part based on STEM
proficiency in the form of a math test
and because of this a lot of people
assume that UTS doesn’t have a gender
gap issue in stem in the grade 7
classroom there are equal numbers of
girls and boys and even though this is
the case but something
that participation does not predict is
either experience or performance for
these grade seven girls in the math
class that are in equal numbers as boys
do they still have the same experience
did they feel as good in the classroom
do they raise their hand as much did
they enjoy the class as much and do they
perform as other male counterparts did
they get as they do as well in math
competitions did they go on to pursue
careers in math these are all questions
that we wanted to address in our
research our research question is what
social factors at our school contribute
to a gender disparity in STEM
competition results we’re studying this
because we know that female students are
participating in and succeeding in all
of our standard courses and that there’s
no inherent biological advantage for
male students but in those upper
echelons of stem competition there’s a
huge gender disparity now we know that
gender is a spectrum and also because it
would be a huge generalization to say
that all female students have had one
experience and all male students have
had another experience but what we’re
noticing ultimately is that there is an
ingrained preference for masculinity and
male traits in STEM environments and an
ingrained underestimation of femaleness
and female traits we began our study by
looking at the stem pipeline so all the
way from younger classes and younger
students where there tends to be a bit
more gender parity until stem
professionals where women make up only
about a quarter of the stem workplace we
then found this 2010 study by Ellison
and Swanson that showed the gender gap
on both the SAT math and on the AMC 12
which is a very high-level math
competition as you can see although at
lower percentiles so at below average
and average female and male students
perform about as well as each other as
you get to the highest percentile levels
the rate of females drops dramatically
for instance at the 99th percentile
level only 14% of those achievers are
female and the top forty six students
who wrote the contest were all-male we
wanted to look at the fact that a this
is not just due to participation rates
as for instance on the SAT math a
hundred thousand students write it then
male students
and for the AMC 12 although the rate is
slightly smaller it’s not nearly enough
to account for the 14% discovered the
14% level we also wanted to ignore
theories of predisposition or innate
ability because this has been
discredited in multiple studies showing
that it is more of a societal factor
that causes female students to under
in addition we wanted to study what it
would be with different STEM fields so
while this study only looked at math we
have seen that the gender gap is closing
much more quickly in areas such as
biology than it is in others such as
computer science where it’s almost
stagnating and we wanted to study super
elite schools
so although the boys in this study came
from a wide variety of schools all over
half of the female students came from
only 20 super elite schools our school
UTS as Amy mentioned earlier could be
considered one of those super elite
schools and we wanted to study what the
gender gap would be like here for if it
exists strongly here it must as well and
many other areas when we wanted we
wanted to look at a variety of different
math contests over the past eight years
and the Honorables of all of these math
contests and science contests to see how
UTS students did in terms of gender
discrepancy the first type of contest
that we wanted to look at were math
contests which at UTS are definitely the
most common type of contest taken what
we saw was across the 12 different
contests that we looked at there was a
really similar rate of female presence
in the honor roll around 30% and this is
especially troubling for contests like
for example the Gauss grade 7 which is
mandatory for all students and therefore
has equal participation rates of girls
and boys and yet it still only had a 27
percent rate of female presence in the
Honor Roll suggesting a really large
discrepancy even at such a young age as
Amanda was mentioning earlier there are
differences among the different STEM
fields for example for physics over the
past eight years there have been 17 UTS
students who have made the cap exam on a
roll the cap exam is a competitive
physics contest in throughout Canada
out of the 17 students who made the
honor roll only one was a girl
conversely as you can see with biology
even though there is a little bit of a
gender discrepancy it’s nowhere near as
severe for the top 170 competitors on
the national biology competition
forty-five percent were girls however
another worrying trend that we see here
is as we go up in percentile rankings so
as we look at the top 1% of competitors
for the NBC this number decreases to 41%
so at higher percentile levels girls are
doing worse even in fields like biology
where there’s pretty close to equal
numbers of girls and boys another field
that we could see this in was computer
science and for the computer science
contests we look at looked at three main
contests the junior CCC the senior CCC
both of which are qualifying contests
for the CCO or the Canadian computing
Olympiad and what we saw here was
already at the CCC level the rate of
female presence on the Honor Roll is
extremely low for the junior CCC it was
only 17% and for the senior it was even
lower at 14% but as we get to that
highest level of competition the
Canadian computing Olympiad we saw that
rate decreased dramatically so over the
past eight years 14 UTS students have
made the CCO honor roll and out of those
14 students 0 were girls what this
really does is highlight what we’re
trying to say here today which is that
even at a school that’s as competitive
and interesting as UTS that emits equal
numbers and girls and boys and tries to
give them the same type of education and
the same tools to succeed in the STEM
environment we have such a large
discrepancy misconceptions of what
female women in stem of all the female
women in stem are common and they exist
in a cycle so prejudices are
internalized and then they’re taught and
we’re not attributing any of this to the
prejudice or misogyny of any individual
but again it’s a cycle and we think that
a lot of these preconceptions come from
ideas of who a woman in stem is so who
they are socially what they look like
and what careers they might go into and
we do think that this changes the type
of encouragement that
answer given we’ve identified a few
different ways that we think are simple
but also can go a long long way in terms
of remedying this this huge problem with
disparity so first of all female role
models we think that having a diverse
group of female role models is really
going to be important for a changing
those preconceptions of what different
STEM careers are like and what people in
stem are like and what women in stem are
like and also there was a study done in
2012 that proves that women actually
female students it’s especially
important for them to have role models
and people that they can look up to now
second of all talking about programs
that are essentially affirmative action
like the ones that Amy did that are need
to be distinguished and need to be
recognized as just as competitive as
their co-ed and male counterparts and
third teaching methods so there was
actually a study done in 2015 by Simon
at Elle and in it they talked about
different teaching methods that are
ideal for different types of students
now we know that in STEM environments in
most stem classrooms one thing that can
be hugely advantageous to a student and
a huge skill is the ability to just take
a problem and not necessarily know at
the beginning if you’re able to figure
it out but be able to work through it
and I’ll alternate lis get to the end of
it now this is great and this is
absolutely a huge skill but what about
students who don’t have that confidence
right off the bat that maybe would
rather be shown how to do something
first so they can be confident that they
know that that method can work and then
they’re 100% able to complete it after
that so that’s one of the one of those
kinds of methods that if we’re just more
open to these kinds of different
teaching methods and different ways that
students like to learn in our
comfortable learning it’s ultimately
going to make stem a much more inclusive
environment because remember ultimately
we’re learning in an environment that
was designed with masculinity in mind
regardless of who exactly is
participating in it and all the
prejudices of any specific person in it
here our goal is to make sure that
anyone can walk into a stem classroom
and make sure that they don’t feel
excluded or isolated but rather
empowered and capable having more female
students in stem is going to create a
positive feedback loop
students of all genders are going to
lead to leaders of all genders and this
in turn inspires the next generation we
really hope that this talk today has
inspired initiatives towards meaningful
gender equality both at our school and
beyond
thank you
[Applause]
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