STEM changing to be more inclusive

Gender imbalance has led to technology that reflects male experience

“While we're gonna have to face a lot more struggles just because of [being a woman], I also get to experience a lot of wonderful things, like the relationship between two women.”

22.7% of students are girls in third period Principles of Engineering.

20% of students are girls in the sixth period Principles of Engineering class.

Kaylynn Park Senior

Engineering teacher Barbara Schremp is among two female engineering teachers at Branham.

Schremp also teaches Integrated Math 3 and is the Career Technical Education Department co-chair, and said she has seen her fair share of difficulties in teaching predominantly male-taught subjects.

Her decision to pursue engineering came at San Jose State where she majored in electrical engineering, even though math and science were not her best subjects.

“I was actually better in English and history, but I loved science and math, and I knew that engineering involves using math and science to solve problems for people,” Schremp said. “And so I went into engineering specifically because I like to solve problems.”

However, the journey in chasing and honing her passions was far from smooth. She experienced a substantial amount of sexism, but she learned to adapt to these unfavorable conditions overtime.

“When I was in the working world in the ’90s, the things that were acceptable would be things people get fired over today,” she said.

For example, one of the very first speaker phones her company worked with was only modeled on men's voices, so when Schremp was on a call during a conference, her voice was not picked up by the microphone. Her male colleague had to repeat everything she said, and she said the experience was incredibly demeaning.

“They were really embarrassed to see that my tone of voice being female was not representative in the performance of this thing,” Schremp said. “It's a small piece of technology, but it gave me a real disadvantage and furthers the poor representation of people who design and test and have the ideas.”

Still, Schremp advocated for herself because that was the environment she was accustomed to, but it did not come naturally.

She said the stigma toward women in STEM is still prevalent and derives from “old fashioned ideas and perceptions about women.” There is still room for improvement among her engineering classes as even with a slight increase in female students this year, there are only a quarter of girls in the class.

“We look at the representations of the different genders and ethnic groups, and we are not representative of what Branham’s population is,” Schremp said. “For instance, AI right now is really being trained on existing data, and if you only have data from certain perspectives, then you're always going to have inequity in a system.”

She hopes to find better ways in recruiting and maintaining underrepresented groups of students in the engineering classes especially.

“People want to see role models like themselves,” Schremp said. “And as we get more and more people in STEM who are more diverse, then we'll get more interest from a diverse group of people.”

44% of women with at least a bachelor's degree or higher are in the STEM workforce.

25.8% of all STEM careers employ women.

34% of women are employed in STEM occupations in the U.S. — Source: U.S. Department of Labor