Photo: Smeeta Mahanti for Sproutling/Parentage
At Parentage, four NASA robotics experts who also happen to be women with children offer their thoughts on what we need to do to make math and science careers more appealing, safe, and rewarding for girls and women.
The wonder of outer space bewitches boys and girls alike, but far fewer women than men make it into the ranks of adults working in space science. Girls take high-level mathematics and science courses at around the same rate as boys in high school, but gender disparities emerge at the undergraduate collegiate level, where women in science focus more heavily in the biological sciences, and earn a mere 18 percent of undergraduate degrees in computer science and in engineering. Things get worse in the workplace, when nearly one in five women with a STEM degree will leave the workforce.
But that’s not the case among the Intelligent Robotics group at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., where seven women—software engineers, computer scientists, and researchers—are developing instruments slated for deployment on a lunar rover in 2020. Their tools will help the rover autonomously navigate, probe, and analyze the moon’s surface. Not only are their jobs literally out-of-this-world cool, but these women make up nearly a quarter of their 30-person team—a fairly high percentage among a group of engineers and roboticists.
Read their 7 tips here. [sproutling.com]
