Today is Ada Lovelace Day. For those of you who don’t know, Ada was considered to be the world’s first computer programmer. More than 150 years after her death, she remains an inspiring figure — and a reminder of why women still have so far to go when it comes to STEM careers. Yes, we have amazing women like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg, but women still only make up just 25% of the STEM workforce.
A survey by the Bayer Corporation came out today showing that American women entering college are the best prepared academically to hit the books and successfully graduate with a STEM degree (82%), according to a survey of faculty from the nation’s top 200 research universities who chair STEM departments. However, many of these women don’t end up graduating with these degrees. The chairs say being discouraged from a STEM career is still an issue today for both female and underrepresented minority (URM) STEM undergraduate students (59%) and that traditional rigorous introductory instructional approaches that “weed out” students early on from STEM studies are generally harmful and more so to URM (56%) and female (27%) students compared to majority students (i.e. Caucasian and Asian males).