In the context of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), through the Coordination for Gender Equality, and the start up Epic Queen hold the first Festival of Girls in Science and Technology, to inspire and contribute to reducing the gender gap in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). According to data from the coordination, the participation of women in undergraduate and graduate degrees related to engineering, mathematics and technology is less than 40 percent.
Fernanda López, Executive Assistant for Inclusion and Community Practices of the Coordination for Gender Equality of UNAM, and Ana Karen Ramírez, founder and CEO of Epic Queen, spoke to M2 about this free virtual event that began yesterday and will end today.
“This event was born from the need to observe gender biases in the payroll of science majors and all those that make up STEM, these biases are observed in admission to the undergraduate degree that becomes a cascade phenomenon, masters, doctorates; so we want to disappear this gap between men and women ”, highlighted Fernanda López.
“We could say that there are still prejudices and they are described as feminized and masculinized careers, we want to remove those gender stereotypes because in the collective imagination women are said to be better at care, for the arts and cooking, this encourages their integration to a greater extent to psychology, social work, nursing, so we want to eliminate this with new generations ”, added López.
There are numbers that verify these facts: of the degree in Mechanical Engineering only 9.1% of the total of students are women, in Electrical and Electronic Engineering the figure is 11.2%; at the postgraduate level, in PhD and Master of Science (Physics) there are only 10.1% and 11.8% women, respectively.
“We have identified that there is a great problem in this regard, we must begin to transform it because precisely the world is changing, we must adapt to the revolution; if we as women are not in this, we are really going to lag behind and it affects us because for a long time we have been the ones who are not in these areas, ”said Ana Karen.
“Technology, robotic intelligence is advancing, and the pandemic alerted us, to learn that we do need many more creators of technology and obviously science, scientists what we need the most,” he added.
Julieta Fierro, science communicator and astronomer; Anasofía Sánchez, CEO of Waze Mexico; Paola Escalante, Head of Creative Shop Facebook; Ana Elena Escalante, director of the Institute of Ecology at UNAM; Pilar Carreón, director of the Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Catalina Stern, director of the Faculty of Sciences.