International Day of Women and Girls in Science
Women still make less than 30% of researchers and scientists in the world. Why is that? There are many different reasons why women are still excluded from science and research nowadays. When we talk about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) Jobs we will notice that women are definitely the minority. But furthermore we will realize that there are still discrimination and biased gender stereotypes that exist in STEM.
The change of the current situation will not only affect our present time, it will have a big impact on our future. In fact the increase of women and girls in science would make the world a better place and would give the STEM fields a lot of new input and innovation. Looking into future labour market 65% of the children that attend to primary school right now will end up in jobs that not even exist yet. This is a significant number which underlines that innovation and the change in science are necessary. If we look in the past on the other hand we we can see that there were already plenty of women who changed the world with their passion and research for and in science. And that number of women, who did significant research, would increase if there were more women in STEM fields. Heading back to the nowadays problems we have to face everyday, you see that for every 20 STEM jobs lost, women gain one new STEM job while men gain five. This is just one example to emphasize the current situation of discrimination and minority of women in science and research. Therefore different organizations were founded in the last decades to face these problems. One of them and probably the most popular is “UN Women“. It is engaged and involved in a lot of projects and programs that do something and fight against discrimination of women and fight for gender equality in all aspects. But Organizations can’t have an influence without the people and this is the point that we should focus on.
When we talk about gender equality people should realize that it is a serious issue and problem that we still face in the 21th century. Take over responsibility especially for your own actions and for the peoples actions in your surrounding. In my opinion gender equality and especially the establishment of women and girls in Science will bring the society a step forward.
The change of the current situation will not only affect our present time, it will have a big impact on our future. In fact the increase of women and girls in science would make the world a better place and would give the STEM fields a lot of new input and innovation. Looking into future labour market 65% of the children that attend to primary school right now will end up in jobs that not even exist yet. This is a significant number which underlines that innovation and the change in science are necessary. If we look in the past on the other hand we we can see that there were already plenty of women who changed the world with their passion and research for and in science. And that number of women, who did significant research, would increase if there were more women in STEM fields. Heading back to the nowadays problems we have to face everyday, you see that for every 20 STEM jobs lost, women gain one new STEM job while men gain five. This is just one example to emphasize the current situation of discrimination and minority of women in science and research. Therefore different organizations were founded in the last decades to face these problems. One of them and probably the most popular is “UN Women“. It is engaged and involved in a lot of projects and programs that do something and fight against discrimination of women and fight for gender equality in all aspects. But Organizations can’t have an influence without the people and this is the point that we should focus on.
When we talk about gender equality people should realize that it is a serious issue and problem that we still face in the 21th century. Take over responsibility especially for your own actions and for the peoples actions in your surrounding. In my opinion gender equality and especially the establishment of women and girls in Science will bring the society a step forward.
Felix Neo Rieder
Sources:
https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/womenandgirlinscienceday http://www.un.org/en/events/women-and-girls-in-science-day/index.shtml http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/international-day-of-women-and-girls-in-science https://owsd.net/about-owsd/what-owsd https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/
