Street Roots • Jan. 8-14, 2016
News
Page 5
GIRLS INC., from page 4
“It’s not only a recruitment problem; it’s
a pipeline problem,” said Jennifer “Yenni”
Cazares.
“Girls are receiving messages that are so
traumatizing that by fourth grade, they
understand that math and science are not
for them,” she said.
A study by the National Center for
Education Statistics found 66 percent of
fourth-grade girls and 68 percent of fourth
grade boys said they liked science. But
shortly thereafter, more girls than boys
begin to turn away from STEM, reports the
National Science Foundation. It also notes
that by second grade, when asked to draw a
scientist, most boys and girls draw a white
male in a lab coat.
When Cazares spoke with Street Roots in
early November, she was working at a
nonprofit that’s been sparking curiosity
about STEM in Portland-area girls for more
than a decade. Girls Inc. of the Pacific
Northwest runs an after-school
empowerment program where elementary
school girls attend workshops to build life
skills and get interactive STEM experience.
Cazares decided to put her energy into
diversifying STEM industries after her
isolating experience as the only female and
only minority student accepted into a
renewable energy engineering program at
Oregon Institute of Technology.
“I marked all the right boxes for their
diversity needs,” she said.
Elizabeth Nye, director of Girls Inc. of the
Pacific Northwest, said she was “one of
those girls who a t an early age was
dissuaded from p u rsu in g ST E M
indefinitely.”
Nye said she worked for years to establish
national Girls Inc.’s most comprehensive
program, called Eureka!, locally. Now in its
third year in Portland and second in
Woodburn, she hopes to expand it.
Eureka! is a five-year commitment aimed
at fixing the pipeline problem by engaging
girls at a young age and keeping them
interested in STEM through high school.
Each Girls Inc. affiliate runs Eureka! a
little differently, and one thing Girls Inc. of
the Pacific Northwest is doing a little
differently, Nye said, is making sure it’s 100
percent free to all participants.
“Based on what we know about the girls
we serve, that’s too much of a barrier,” she
said. The after-school girls groups, which
Girls Inc. often recruits from for the
Eureka! program, are primarily at
elementary schools that have a high
percentage of students on the free and
reduced-price lunch program, she said.
For Nye, the wage gap between men and
women is her personal motivation for
promoting the work of Girls Inc. She said
the high-paying jobs of the future are mostly
in STEM, and the wage gap between men
and women in those fields is actually smaller
than the overall wage gap.
“I feel a very strong connection to
ensuring our girls get access to those
positions,” she said.
While the wage gap between men and
women in non-STEM jobs is 21 percent,
women make 14 percent less than men in
STEM jobs, according to data compiled by
Girls Inc.
Most STEM jobs pay well above the
average for all occupations in the region,
which is $51,000 per year, said Vander Vliet,
.
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P H O T O B Y W O J T E K R A JSK I
Participants in ChickTech. High School at Portland State University learn how to operate a video camera and mic before interviewing other groups
o f students. A t the end o f the fin a l night, they livestreamed an interview with ChickTech co-lead Janelle Cobum.
IN PORTLAND
BIB Female I I Male
Population:
Tech workers:
S O U R C E S : P O R T L A N D D E V E L O P M E N T C O M M IS S IO N , O R E G O N E M P L O Y M E N T D E P A R T M E N T ,
JOBS HELD BY WOMEN AT TECH COMPANIES
S O U R C E : N E X T G E N E R A T IO N R E C R U IT M E N T
of the Oregon Employment Department.
Locally, computer and mathematical
occupations pay an average of $81,000
annually, architecture and engineering an
average of $80,000, and life and physical
science an average of $67,000, she said.
Girls begin Eureka! prior to eighth grade
with a summer camp focused on STEM skill
building, with activities such as Lego
robotics and prosthetic building and
exposure to prominent women working in
STEM fields. Throughout the school year,
monthly workshops keep the girls engaged.
During the third through fifth years of
Eureka!, girls participate in “externships,”
which are similar to internships but with
more emphasis on job shadowing than
performing tasks, and they have the
opportunity to take college classes.
Nationally, the program has proven
successful. An impact study of 10 Eureka!
programs showed that after the first year,
the majority of participants listed STEM or
STEM-related careers for their future plans.
After the second year, 89 percent said they
planned to attend a four-year college and 68
percent agreed or agreed strongly that they
could handle harder math.
Street Roots attended a monthly
workshop for Portland-area participants in
December where eighth- and ninth-grade
girls met with a panel of women who work
in STEM, including a WebMD data
cruncher, a chemist and a fish and wildlife
biologist.
The majority of attendees Street Roots
spoke with said their parents made them
enroll in Eureka! But those same girls also
said unanimously that they’re glad their
parents signed them up and that they
planned to stick with it through high school.
One of those girls is Taevalin Sok, 14, of
Reynolds High School. She said she’s
interested in pursuing a career in chemical
engineering.
Another is Amaya Gustave, a ninth-grader
at Franklin High School. She said she didn’t
really like math and science and would have
never considered a career in STEM before
her parents enrolled her in Eureka'. But
now, she said, she’s discovered she likes
sc ien c e and is considering STEM because
there are a lot more options! in those fields
than she was aware of before.
For girls who already had an affinity for
left-brained activities, the program is
keeping those passions alive.
Eboni Holmes, an eighth-grader at Floyd
Light Middle School, is an avid fiction
reader who wants a career in science, and
she especially enjoys the Friday field trips
during summer camp.
“It’s really nice,” she said. “We get to see
different scenery, and sometimes we get to
walk a lo t It’s really good memories.”
The summer day camps are held at area
community colleges, and the girls meet
inside the colleges’ science classrooms and
labs. Activities range from engineering and
chemistry to computer science and biology.
In Woodburn, students wrote the coding
for a video game based on the Disney movie
“Frozen.” In Portland, the girls built habitats
for bats while learning how bats contribute
to the ecosystem.
But because the camps are held at
colleges that are close to schools Girls Inc.
recruits from, Nye said, one of the biggest
challenges in retaining the girls is
gentrification and its byproduct -
displacement.
When the girls in Eureka! graduate from
high school, Nye said, Girls Inc. will help
them apply for college scholarships. This
was a major draw for Rosa Barajas, who
enrolled her 14-year-old daughter in the
program.
“This is what I needed when I was
younger,” she said. As a first-generation
American, she said her parents were not
able to help her in this way.
See GIRLS INC., page 7