Kaitlin Rizk, Brenna Fromayan, Natalie Leonard and Wendy Ng know all too well why female representation is of the utmost importance in STEM fields.
The Georgia Tech students, with the aid of the CREATE-X program at Tech, have started Stempower, a nonprofit startup dedicated to encouraging girls to pursue their interests, build confidence and breakdown stereotypes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Rizk, a fourth-year industrial and systems engineering student and CEO of Stempower, said research shows girls often lack confidence, role models and a peer system when studying in STEM fields.
"We developed a program providing girls role models to give them the confidence," she said.
And it appears the results of the program are already paying off; since the startup's inception in 2016, more than 200 girls have participated in Stempower's mentoring program. Eighty percent of the girls later reported a higher interest in STEM and 63 percent said they had higher self-confidence. The founders have worked with Girl Scout troops and young women at schools across metro Atlanta.
"We entered the CREATE-X program and we started new lines of business and now we do weekend workshops where girls would come for a shorter time period and a professor teaches them something in her lab, or they learn how to code and make circuits, and then also we are doing summer camps this summer," Rizk said.
Stempower was born in the Georgia Tech Grand Challenges Living Learning Community, a program in which students work in groups to tackle a problem facing humanity, when the founders were freshman engineers, Fromayan said.
"We’re all women at Georgia Tech studying STEM and so we’re very familiar with the barriers that women face getting into STEM, so this is kind of where the idea originated from," she said.
One main motivator to breaking through those barriers were role models the founders said guided them into pursuing their passions. Fromayan said she began internalizing negative stereotypes about her field at a young age with the belief that STEM was only meant for boys. When Rizk was in the sixth grade, she said a math teacher told her she wasn't good enough for honors math and the encouragement from her father, an engineer, lead her to pursue her dreams regardless.
Even at Georgia Tech, the founders said they constantly see their female peers doubt their abilities while their male peers act overly confident.
On a societal level, a lack of women in STEM is detrimental to the future of innovation and technology, especially in the U.S. where there's a projected deficit for engineers by 2025, Fromayan said.
"It’s of the upmost importance right now, especially trying to get more people into STEM," she said. "And the fact is that over 60 percent of fourth grade girls are interested in math and science, but only 23 percent of people in engineering right now are women. There’s a clear disconnect of girls who are interested and the girls who actually end up being retained in this field, and so girls are being pushed out unnecessarily, which is why we’re here."
Without proper representation for women in STEM, there's a disservice to the research and problems that engineers and innovators are trying to solve, the women said.
"When the first airbags were designed, men designed them and women and children died at a higher rate," Rizk said. "For heart disease, there’s a lot of research that shows that women are highly diagnosed wrong because men are the ones coming up with the research and these are the pivotal reasons why we need women in STEM."
As Stempower continues mentoring girls in Atlanta, the founders said they are working to expand their mentorship to other universities across the country and constantly looking for corporate sponsorships and partnerships with women in STEM.
"We want women to support other women, so we’re look more partners or especially corporate sponsorships so that we can bring girls to companies, and they can see women in those roles, have that role model, because if you see it, you can be it, we believe," Rizk said.
