Expanding Your Horizons Annual Conference

April 12, 2009 – More than 160 girls from local middle and high schools explored their interests in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering Saturday at the Expanding Your Horizons Conference, held at the University of Arizona. The conference featured a keynote speaker, 12 interactive workshops including DNA forensics, bumblebee colonies, and astronomy, and career panels comprised of women in the science and mathematics fields.

Carly Thomsen, the events coordinator for the Women in Science and Engineering Program, noted that although there is a disparity between the number of females employed in science and mathematics fields compared to males, it’s not due to a lack of proficiency in these subjects.

“It’s not about their aptitude or their ability to succeed,” said Thomsen, the coordinator of the conference.

Now in its 27th year, the Expanding Your Horizons Conference is held by the Women in Science and Engineering Program, an organization on campus that has been working to promote gender equity at the UA since they were established in 1976. The conference is one of their many projects geared toward encouraging women to enter the science and mathematics fields.

In 2004, the National Science Board reported that less than 24 percent of women were employed in the science and engineering labor force, less than 33 percent of all scientists were women and women comprised less than 10 percent of the engineering workforce.

Heather Fukunaga, a women’s studies graduate student, said that women are socialized to enter careers that are caring, and not objective like the hard sciences.

“Boys are given chemistry sets while girls are given Barbie dolls,” Fukunaga, an employee of the Women in Science and Engineering Program, said.

Panel speaker Annie Leonard, a postdoctoral fellow in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the UA, talked about a friend who went to an elementary school classroom to speak to a group of children about science, and asked the students to draw a picture of a scientist.

Every student drew a picture of a white male.

A recent study conducted at Cornell University found that women often opt out of science and math-based careers because of their desire to have a family or their disinterest in fields of science that are intensive in math.

Thomsen said that the combination of being inspired by women’s careers, creating a comfortable environment and doing fun and interactive projects is what helps the Expanding Your Horizons Conference spark young women’s interest in these subjects.

“It’s just hearing the stories of how people ended up where they are today,” Leonard said. “We’re all women and we’ve all taken individual and different paths to where we are.”

Panel speaker Barbara Fransway, a research specialist senior at the UA Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory, noted how she did not notice the disparity in the number of women compared to men in her college biology classes. She also mentioned that the women were usually more serious than their male counterparts in the content and attendance of those courses.

“Women were outperforming the men,” Fransway said. “That should be an inspiration, that science is no longer a boys’ club.”

The National Academy of Sciences recently released a report that discussed how women educated in the science and math fields are necessary for the United States to continue its global academic leadership role.

The organization also said that institutions are reporting more women in these respective programs, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has 51 percent female science undergraduates and 35 percent female engineering undergraduates.

This is just the kind of trend that the volunteers and coordinators of the Expanding Your Horizons Conference hope will inspire young women.

“Having these people come into a community of like-minded successful women and having positive examples of role models, it’s very validating for their interests,” said Fransway. “It might not be the most popular thing at school, but it is the most important thing.”