I never wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician or anything relating to STEM. It has always been so intimidating as a girl. There was a part of me that always told myself I was good at English and History and therefore I would never be good at math or science. I told myself to focus on what I was good at and not to care about what I was not good at. So, I never tried in science fair. “Leave it up to the kid whose parents are both scientists,” I told myself. Sure, I still studied hard and got straight A’s, but I did not care about the subject matter.

That all changed this year when I decided to sign up for the Data Jam club at my school. I signed up because it looked fun but I had no idea what I would take from it. After all, I’m not a science-y person and I assumed everyone else who signed up was. However, as the year progressed, I started enjoying learning about data. I learned about how data affects our everyday lives and what we can do to prevent this data from invading our privacy. My group decided to look at how employment rate percentages, number of arrests, and income affected gun violence in different parts of our city. We did this because of recent acts of gun violence that took place here; a young black man named Antwon Rose was recently shot by a white police officer and there was a mass shooting at my synagogue. I enjoyed this process of finding correlations in the data and I was excited to present our findings in front of the judges. Finally, the day arrived.

I entered school and was ecstatic for the presentation. I went to my English class which I have always loved and my math class, Algebra 1 which I was not so comfortable in. Algebra 1 is considered the average math class for 9th graders. However, because my school is a prep school, a lot of my peers are in Geometry, Algebra II or even Pre-Calculus. For this reason, a lot of the girls in my class had a mindset that they were already bad at math, so there was no point in trying. It was a struggle not to give into this mindset, but I was able to persevere because of support from my teacher. As I left my math class early to go to Data Jam, everyone cheered me on while I walked out the door. I got into the van with my team and we headed to a local Catholic high school for the presentation.

When we got to the high school, we were guided into our room. I looked around at my other competitors. I noticed that most of them were boys. I took a look at the judges panel, and to my dismay, there was only one woman. One of my teammates remarked that this was the first year that there was a woman on the judges panel. Coming from an all-girls school where most of my classmates were interested in STEM, I was dismayed at the fact that the passion of girls in STEM subjects did not carry over to the other high schoolers in my area. I thought that women in science was not something unusual. But as Data Jam taught me, I was wrong.

When we sat through each team’s presentations I noticed how there were some teams where the girls were leading the presentation, some teams that were all boys, and some teams where there was an even balance of team member’s genders. There were no teams that consisted of all girls. Then, my group came up. We went through our presentation and then it became time for questions. Each judge asked their assortment of questions. Then, the woman judge spoke. “I do not have a question but I just wanted to say that I love that your team is all girls”. She remarked. We all laughed and informed her that we were an all-girls school.

Even though this was humorous it opened my eyes to the fact that women are not being encouraged to go into math or science. When I go to a data competition, I should have role models to look up to. Thankfully, I was able to look up to the three seniors and a teacher with my group. Not all girls have role models and competitions like these should provide them.

After the presentation, I walked to the library with some of my peers to do some homework before heading to the award ceremony. A few hours later we walked over to where the presentations were being held. When we got there, I was overwhelmed with even more data posters but unfortunately, not a lot of women. As my group members and I stood by our poster, the woman judge came up. We talked to her about our poster and she told us she really liked it. We also talked about the fact that she was the only judge who was a woman and she agreed that this organization needs to get more female judges. It is not like there is a shortage of female scientists. From our conversation, I realized that as a woman I was more than needed in science. I felt obligated to continue with science and encourage my female peers to do so as well.

According to Chris Anderson, the head of TED, “There are many people (often female) who massively underestimate the value of their work and their learning, and their insights”. I think this is the greatest barrier for women who want to go into STEM. Women already struggle with confidence and are not as encouraged as their male peers to pursue STEM related topics. As young people and women, we must encourage each and every girl. We must value and validate each other. We must commit to being confident and brave. We must become scientists, mathematicians, writers, dancers and anything else we want to be. We must be persistent with our endeavours. And most importantly, we should not let our gender stop us.