Final Project
Namra Arshad
Professor Cacoilo
Acts of Resistance: Activists, Interlopers and Pranksters
May 7, 2019
My semester project revolves around women of color and their role in field of science. In starting, I was just blindly focus on role of women of color in biology field as I am a biology major. But as I continued with my research, I was shocked to come across the overall brutal number of women working in STEM major. There are many reasons why we don’t see a balance. One of those many reason is not enough recognition of those women of color who contributed so much of their life working in these fields but were never recognized to encourage those who came after them. All these careers are known to be “masculine.” According to a study done in 2018, across regions,women are less likely to enter, more likely to leave STEM careers because their career peak about ten years into their fields. Many other factors include Isolation, hostile male-dominated work environments, ineffective executive feedback, and a lack of effective sponsors are factors pushing women to leave their STEM careers. So, there’s more women leaving their careers in STEM majors than entering every day. The share of STEM degree is even smaller for women of color. There were less than one-quarter (24%) of women that were employed in STEM careers. There were only 11.3% of women of color that earned a degree of bachelor’s across all STEM fields in 2014-2015 and those numbers haven’t change much in past few years. Those 11.3% included 2.9% Black women, 3.6% Latinas and 4.8%Asian women.
In order to bring a change in these fields, we have to encourage girls overall from a very young age to be not hopeful. We have to encourage them to pursue their dreams. While working on my project, we were introduced to a book “Confession of Guerrilla Girls” in class. They motivated me in every possible way to go out of my way to do what I believe. Guerrilla Girls are feminist activist’s artists known to speak for gender equality in every field.
My goal for this project is to create an Instagram page and introduced those women of color, who worked very hard in these fields and made their name by contributing their lives. By exposing these role models to young girls, I intend to encourage them as I was while working on this project. Through this page, I will be sharing stories and achievement of women of color who made mark in STEM fields. I hope to create a world through this page for young girls where their dreams are not just dreams. I aim to motivate them to pursue their dreams to create a balance world. Below is one of many stories from the page:
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| A screenshot from the page |
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| A story |
Work Cited:
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