The Women of WiSE

Women and men deserve to be whatever they want to be. Teachers, politicians, engineers, bus drivers – anything in the whole world should be obtainable to anyone.

So why are there still male-dominated and female-dominated fields?

Here at Iowa State University, women are very underrepresented in STEM fields. A STEM field is a topic that relates to science, technology, engineering, or math. The STEM fields that women are mainly underrepresented in are engineering and computer science. Why is there such a lack of women in technological and scientific fields? Is it simply due to a lack of interest?

With multiple studies involved, it has been discovered that the reason why women aren’t in these fields is simply because hardly any other women are. Women don’t pursue plans to be an engineer or scientist since they don’t see any other women in that field, and it causes them to feel as though they don’t belong.

Fortunately, Iowa State University has become aware of this under-representation of women in STEM fields.

 In the year 1986, an amazing program was created to help women achieve their dreams in all STEM fields. This program was and continues to be specifically designed for women in science and engineering, hence the acronym WiSE. WiSE has impacted many female students on their journey to achieving a future in a male-dominated field. From majoring in mechanical engineering to environmental science, thousands of female students here at ISU are involved in the WiSE community.

The sciences and engineering programs at Iowa State University are both amazing and inclusive to everyone no matter your sex. But still, no one can help but notice the obvious elephant in the room.

To a lot of women involved in scientific fields here at ISU, they feel like they are greatly outnumbered compared to men.

 “In an average class of electrical engineers, the ratio of men to women is roughly 10:1”, said Hailey Lawson, sophomore in electrical engineering.

“It’s a huge struggle when you walk into an engineering class and you only see two girls in the corner, and then all guys,” Vanessa Keeling, a sophomore, explained.

 “It’s intimidating a lot of times, because pretty much every professor you have is a guy, so it’s harder to find role models in this field in your classrooms,” Hailey Waller, junior in environmental science, mentioned.

Enrolled this fall at Iowa State University, 6,936 of undergraduates in an engineering field are male, and 1,319 of them are female. This amounts to barely 16% of engineering undergrads at Iowa State University being female, and 84% being male.

“It’s typically hard to be social in this field, and WiSE opens a very social outlet,” says Aubrey Rohde, a freshmen majoring in chemical engineering.

With WiSE being such a spectacular program, I believe that it should be a more well-known happening on campus. Maybe if more women knew about this program, more would join science, engineering, and technology fields, helping to close the gender gap that STEM fields contain.

WiSE is an organization created to take a woman’s dream to be an engineer, scientist, or veterinarian, and to mold that dream into a realistic future. They have meetings a couple of times a week, with the purpose of meeting other women and creating a network that makes them feel more like they belong than they did before.

Considering that in 1997 women took up around 29% of STEM B.S. degrees, and in 2016 they contained roughly 37% of those degrees, I would say that slowly but surely, someday women will represent 50% of all B.S. degrees in STEM fields, and I hope I’m here for that day.