¡Hola!

This is Alicia, a Co-PI on the Latina SciGirls project! Latinas at Work are a series of twelve short role model profiles of diverse Latina STEM professionals that are designed to inspire girls in STEM. 

Do you work with middle school girls? If so, please let us know if you think producing profiles of younger women (e.g.  high-school and college-age students) would be more effective to encourage more girls to pursue STEM. We would love any feedback and would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Gracias, and enjoy the showcase!

Hi Alicia and Brenda!! This is such a great project. Have you had a chance to assess the impact of the project on youth - particularly the role models piece?

Thank you Roxanne! The project has comprehensive evaluation and research components. The evaluation is focused more on the delivery of the program and the educators (and has shown very positive results), but does include some findings related to the youth participants and the female STEM role models who were involved in the project.

The girls involved in the project (and their parents) strongly agreed that they 'learned a lot from the STEM professionals and that they were good role models'. They also reported that they enjoyed hearing the role models talk about their work, personal life and background, felt they could relate to the role models and that they discussed topics that were relevant to their lives. 

In addition, the majority of youth participants reported increased awareness of and interest in STEM professions; a heightened understanding of the preparation/education necessary to achieving these careers; and more interest in taking related STEM courses in high school.

The research component was more focused on the impact of the youth participants and we will have final results from the research study soon. Preliminary data show a positive impact on the youth, however, including increased emotional connection and personal relevance to STEM. We would be happy to share more of the research findings with you when they are ready.

Brenda

Thank you, Alicia, Brenda and Angie, for sharing your project and for highlighting the whole-life experience of Latina STEM professionals. On a technical note, I appreciated in particular the bilingual captioning throughout as a model for other programs engaging multilingual audiences. I also have a question about evaluation, related to the findings you mentioned above with the role models.

Have you found any impact of participating in SciGirls on the professionals' ongoing interest in role modeling and public communication? I'm curious if - for role models who may not already be deeply engaged in this area - your program might serve as a gateway to long-term pursuit of public engagement?

Thanks Rabiah!

Your question is very interesting, and we are excited to share that the role model STEM professionals that participated in the project showed great interest in visiting other programs as role models. They also indicated that they had a greater appreciation of the value of communicating to youth about their jobs and careers. And also mentioned that they felt more confident in their ability to communicate with youth about their work. We were very excited to see that the program also had a positive impact on the role models and as you mentioned, we believe that it might encourage them to continue engaging youth and their families in STEM! :)

SciGirls has such a great track record. I love to see that your work is going in this direction. When I watched this video, I was struck by the different reasons the STEM professionals gave for being excited about their work - and for getting young Latinas excited about STEM. Some emphasized the value they could add to STEM fields - others the importance of opening doors - or the intrinsic rewards of the work. Did you seek out these different perspectives deliberately, or did it just emerge from your interviews? Do you know anything about which stories the viewers found most compelling?

I'm also impressed by the diversity of Latinas in this video - that seems like a deliberate (and important) attempt to push back against a monolithic stereotype. Is there any material in the videos that touches on cultural identity within that overall category? (i.e., "As a Chicana, it is really important to me that...")

Thank you, I think the videos you are mentioning in your overview here are really useful, and I will incorporate them in my work with teacher candidates. Would it be an idea to include in your thread here the direct link to these videos for easier access? 

This is wonderful!

Is the content produced for a target age-group? 

I love the videos and activities! Thank you so much for this great work! We have used some of your videos for our project boosters, and they are wonderful! We work with students in a primarily Hispanic community, so they are perfect.

Promotion of females in STEM is so important in serving a balanced and represented society!

So, here is my nagging question: it seems that we have been at this for at least the last 20-years, specific and focused programs-workshops, mentors, courses, etc we still have issues. Sure, I am impatience but besides attending to the gender and patriarchal inequities, what more can be done to make really sustained societal and systematic changes?

Thoughts?

Anne,

I totally understand your question/point. Yes, we are still working to broaden participation and increase equity in STEM and we still have challenges. However, there is so much more being done today than even 10 years ago and I do think we're making progress. Everything you mentioned, if done well, helps! And we believe the new wave of role models that our young women are being exposed to is definitely a part of the solution.

Thank you for viewing our video and for your thoughts!

Brenda

Hi Anne!

I agree with Brenda that we are definitely making progress towards broadening participation and increasing equity in STEM. Things are definitively improving for women in STEM, but I also think we can do more. Interestingly, most efforts to increase participation of women in STEM focus exclusively on the women/girls themselves. It occurs to me that an interesting approach that would help to start making sustained societal and systematic changes, could involve focusing on working with boys to begin to instill the value of female STEM perspectives in them. It would be interesting to design STEM programs aimed at forming young men/boys perceptions about females in STEM. For example having a program where we have female role models and mentors for boys. At the same time that we are empowering girls and women in STEM, I think we could also be working with boys/young males to decrease their gender stereotypical views about STEM ability. 

Hi Alicia,

I love your thinking because I think there is a need to shift the thinking of the other 50%! I recently gave a panel presentation with a group of female colleagues, most of us were of color. We were talking about mentoring other women of color, in STEM fields as well as others. Anyhow, we were asked by a male colleague in the audience about how "they" as in males could help... One of my female colleagues mentioned starting to cite more females in papers! I thought that was a great and interesting response! What do you think?

Hi again Anne!

Yesss!  We definitely need to shift the thinking of the other 50%! That is something that I think we need to emphasize with our colleagues (men and women), students, AND parents. Research shows that STEM stereotypes about ability and about "brilliance = males", appear in children at a very young age (6 years of age). Part of the reason is that that young kids acquire stereotypes by listening and watching adults; many parents believe STEM stereotypes! Thus, it is important that teachers/educators and parents become aware of this and help encourage a growth mindset in girls. 

I think educators are doing a great job in helping girls develop a growth mindset and become more resilient. But that is only one part of the problem. We also need to work with young males and adults (parents) to be able to reach equity in STEM education.