Photo: Tony Lanz Illustration: Nicole Chung
We spend a lot of time in our house talking to my nine-year-old stepdaughter about Grown-Up Career Options. ?You could be an engineer!? we say. ?And make cool things and help people! You could be a coder and make websites for awesome causes. You can be a scientist, a math teacher?you can be anything you want.?
We imagine life as it will be 15 years from now, and with all the uncertainty, one thing is abundantly clear: A career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) offers so much for our girls; opportunity, the chance to shape our world and job stability in an increasingly tech-focused marketplace.
?Things are changing so quickly. Ten years from now, everything from making coffee to counting money will be done by machines and computers,? says Ksenia Nadkina, the Calgary Chapter Lead STEM educator of Girls Learning Code, a not-for-profit organization that runs female-friendly workshops and courses across Canada in everything from HTML and CSS to 3D printing and robotics. ?Jobs like barista and teller will be obsolete,? she says. ?Why not prepare girls for the future"? There?s a massive gender imbalance that persists in STEM-related fields. While determining exact cross-industry percentages is tricky, the number of women in these jobs generally hovers between 10 and 30 percent, even though having women involved offers so much to the world. If half of the population isn?t contributing to the best ideas, they?re not...