Women make up 35 percent of STEM positions across the world, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering.
During the Reimagining Opportunities to Achieve and Rise (ROAR) event at the Sarah Heinz House on the North Side on Wednesday, young girls were given the chance to see firsthand what a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, could look like.
“We wanted the young girls to understand the opportunities available to them, it’s OK if they don’t decide to be in STEAM, but I want that to be their choice,” said Demeshia Seals, CEO of Sarah Heinz House, a non-profit that provides support to youth through programming to uplift, empower and help them reach their full potential (STEAM is science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics).
“I am firmly entrenched in the notion that it is hard to be what you can’t see,” Seals said. “The sky is the limit and they can do whatever they decide.”
Around 200 young girls participated in the annual event from schools across the city. The day featured several workshops, including amazing aqueducts with Alcosan, AI text generation with Howmet Aerospace, a robotics academy and human-computer interaction with Carnegie Mellon University and heart-pumping research with the University of Pittsburgh Heart Lab.
“This day is so important because we need more diversity both within people of color and in women in STEM. We get to do that by having our young people come and get to try out things that they might not have tried out in other places. We can do it together in a safe space, and not feel intimated, but feel confident in doing so,” said Christine Nguyen, STEAM director at Sarah Heinz House.
“Today was an opportunity to provide knowledge to the girls so that we could leave the door open for them,” said ROAR alum Paige Frank, 19, who co-led the AI text generation workshop. Frank attends the University of Pittsburgh and interned at Amazon in Seattle this past summer.
“I think a huge part of being a girl in STEM is getting past the ‘I’m not good enough’ mentality. I think today was giving them the confidence and equipping them with the knowledge so that they can walk in rooms and know that they do belong there,” Frank said.
During the event, the young girls were encouraged to give each other one meaningful compliment to promote women’s empowerment. The day concluded with a panel discussion featuring four women in the STEM field: Ashley Petrouski from Howmet Aerospace, Kenya Sheppard Porter from Google, RyKai Wright from MSA Safety and Parva Markiw from Design Group. The theme of their discussion was centered around confidence, curiosity and critical thinking.
During the panel, Porter shared an impactful message with the young girls: “Anytime you hear someone tell you no, if you want it bad enough you can get it. Don’t allow the negative storytelling of others to create fear inside of you so that you don’t move forward, let it drive you and make you hungry and bring you to success.
“Giving back is something that I will always do, being a Black woman in tech and in STEM it is important for me to be the light to shine the way and provide the pathway for girls and other people who look like me to get into this field,” Porter said. “To help them provide them sustainability for themselves and their family.
As Wright was pursuing mechanical engineering, she was told that she was a double negative because she is a woman and a woman of color.
“If you know math, you know that a negative times a negative makes a positive. It’s important to just keep pushing forward despite what others think,” Wright said. “The biggest thing is encouragement, so being able to be a role model is amazing, expressing to the girls that you can do really well in this field.”
Markiw, an Iranian native who came to the United States 20 years ago, became interested in architecture accidentally. She was at the house of a friend whose mother was an architect. The heated floors in their house got her curious.
“When I went through architecture school, there were not a lot of minorities in the room,” Markiw said.
“A lot of schooling looked like males and white counterparts. I want to make sure that I do get involved with these events, just to invite students who may have never heard of architecture as a career — I learned about it by accident. I want to make sure these students have that awareness.”