Thirteen women and three organizations were honored for furthering the involvement of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, known collectively as STEM fields, by state Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, on Thursday.
The honorees of the 15th Assembly District’s annual Women of the Year Award ceremony were all proponents of women’s involvement in scientific fields. Skinner has facilitated the yearly award ceremony and selection process in the district since 2009, but this year, she decided all of the award recipients would be from STEM fields.
“I felt there was a gender gap in the STEM fields,” Skinner said. “Women consistently earn more college degrees than men, but they are not moving into the STEM fields. We need a critical mass of women in science to get to a place of equal opportunity.”
Some women who were honored hold corporate positions in engineering or computer science, while others are science teachers, researchers or advocates for improving accessibility for women and girls to STEM fields.
Most of the women faced gender-based challenges when becoming involved in STEM fields, and those who did not were exceptions to the rule.
“I’ve loved science since childhood, but it turned out that the encouragement I received was unusual for a woman born in the 1950s,” said recipient Elizabeth Stage, executive director of the Lawrence Hall of Science.
Awardee Mayra Padilla, director of the Hispanic Serving Institution STEM grant at Contra Costa College, was only encouraged to enter a STEM field when she reached community college.
“I never met a woman scientist or a Latina woman in the field,” she said. “I didn’t realize the inquisitive observing and making predictions that I considered a hobby could be a profession until I got to community college.”
However, obstacles for women in the STEM field remain even at the top levels of higher education.
“The issues we faced in grad school were really different than those men face, in terms of having to prove we were real scientists,” Padilla said. “The lack of woman mentorship in the areas I wanted to go into was really challenging.”
Awardee Nilgun Ozer, a professor of electrical engineering at San Francisco State University, grew up in Turkey and said the United States is unusual internationally for its discouragement of women in STEM fields.
“In my country, women are encouraged to study engineering and science,” Ozer said. “In the U.S., there is a resistance against girls studying STEM fields by parents and teachers. It is a totally different environment.”
Carol Balfe, another award recipient, has been dedicated to teaching science and developing engaging classroom activities to inspire students. She co-founded a corporate networking group for women in science at Raychem, a telecommunications and aerospace company.
“In the corporate world, it was much harder for a woman to get promoted, which is why I reached out to other women engineers to talk about what we were experiencing,” Balfe said. “I would like to see women and people of color make contributions and not have it be, ‘Oh, that’s a woman, or that’s an African American.’”
Some of the awardees spoke to the necessity of having both men and women involved in STEM fields, because they bring equally valuable but uniquely diverse perspectives.
“Women and men think differently, so you want both, as well as people of different ethnic backgrounds because they think differently, and that makes better science,” said Trina Ostrander, associate director of public policy and communications at Bayer HealthCare.
Seti Sidharta, director of the Center for Science Excellence at Contra Costa College, said girls are told they are not good at math, but the brain is not gendered, and all students should have access to STEM resources.
“Students are deserving,” Sidharta said. “They come from backgrounds where they don’t have a lot of (STEM) role models in the family. We don’t want a low-income background to deter them from going to school.”
The honorees of the 2013 Women of the Year Award attended a celebratory ceremony on Thursday. Skinner worked with Gov. Jerry Brown to approve $1.2 billion in the 2013-14 state budget to go toward STEM-related resources for students.
Contact Stephanie Petrillo at [email protected].