Former NASA scientist bats for getting more women into STEM education
Kolkata: Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist and upcoming Blue Origin astronaut, emphasised the need to encourage more women, particularly from marginalised communities, to pursue STEM education during an interaction at the American Centre in Kolkata on Monday.
“I think that there’s a lot of progress made and yet there’s still much work to be done. In the United States, there’s about 30 per cent Indian females entering the technology space. I would like to make that about 50 per cent...” she said.
“I find the interest and the aptitude is there for the women. However, there are pre-existing cultures and there are other societal demands that we may want to address in order to help make it more comfortable for women to not only complete degrees in the fields known as STEM but also to acclimate into these workplaces. I’ve found that there’s been a lot of work done over the last decade when it comes to culture, when it comes to leadership, and even when it comes to education and exposure of activities early on for women and for girls,” she said.
“We just actually wrapped the seminar-workshop with educators on STEM learning practices that were designed to help them understand how to engage the students. And what was really great was I had an opportunity to take the teachers and turn them into students for a moment by challenging them to put together the lingo coding kit which I created in order to help make STEM accessible at home,” she said.
“Most of the data shows that if you have women in positions of leadership or even if you introduce STEM career pathways to women, what you find is that not only do societies advance but oftentimes companies make more money, they pick up more market share, and you find that the outcome for individuals at home also can improve,” Bowe highlighted.
When asked whether teachers have any role in encouraging students into STEM education, she said when she was in high school her teacher suggested she should be a beautician. “Like, what if I had taken their advice? I would never have founded this company. I would not be going into space,” she said, adding: “I have no objections to the field of beautician. It’s the idea of limitation I object to.”
