Taking Daughters Into Technology
On Thursday, millions of school-age girls will accompany their parents to work sites around the country on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. The event is meant to help girls look beyond traditional fields like teaching and nursing and consider a wider range of careers where women are underrepresented, especially those in science and engineering.
According to statistics provided by the Ms. Foundation for Women--the New York-based sponsor of the annual event--the number of girls in their senior year of high school who were interested in engineering dropped 25% between 1980 and 1990. Nationally, the number of women graduating from college with science degrees is declining. But by the time today’s girls enter the work force, the total number of U.S. jobs for scientists and engineers will have grown by 500,000.
Hence the inspiration for Take Our Daughters to Work Day, now in its fifth year. At AT&T; in New York, girls will create home pages for the World Wide Web. In Dallas, they will suit up in special gear to visit the “clean rooms” where Texas Instruments manufactures semiconductor chips.
“Early on, girls are interested in math and science, but as they get older they have an increasingly negative view of science classes and science careers,” said Marie Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation. “There aren’t enough follow-through mechanisms to help them get into these careers.”
Linda Reed can attest to that. Growing up in Detroit, she spent her spare time designing helicopters. Yet despite graduating from high school in a city famous for its engineering enterprises, none of her teachers or guidance counselors encouraged her to study engineering in college.
She went into advertising instead. But after seven years in the field, she decided to go back to school to study electrical engineering. Today she is a six-year veteran of TRW, the mammoth space and defense electronics firm in Redondo Beach.
“There are so many great things that can be done with science and technology, and girls should be involved with that,” said Reed, who is the Los Angeles section president for the Society of Women Engineers. “They can use technology to solve problems--not just making bombs but finding solutions to world hunger, for example. Scientists are going to come up with that, and engineers are going to be the ones to implement it.”
Last year, girls in New York visited companies in the fashion industry and were surprised to learn that computers were an integral part of the design process. “Technology is a part of every workplace now,” and girls need to be aware of that, Wilson said.
Not only will the day help girls to picture themselves in science and technology careers, it will also help such companies get used to the idea of women in their work forces.
Historically, “being feminine and being a woman in science were not seen as compatible,” said Catherine Didion, executive director of the Assn. for Women in Science in Washington, D.C. “Take Our Daughters to Work Day reiterates that there is an appropriate role for women in science and engineering.”
* Karen Kaplan, a freelance writer who covers technology and careers, can be reached by e-mail at Karen.Kaplan@latimes.com
