‘You don’t know what you don’t know:’ Why so few women working in STEM?

The research Karen Maxwell and her team are doing has the potential to save lives.

In the simplest terms, they grow bacteria, then try to kill it with bacteria-hunting viruses called phages.

“We’re trying to understand how we can use these as an alternative to antibiotics and the role they play in human health,” says Maxwell, who runs a biomedical research lab in Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District.

Maxwell, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto, says she didn’t always see herself in a leadership position.

“At the time, I would say in graduate school, I didn’t have very many female role models that were balancing families and work,” she says. “It just didn’t seem that being a faculty member was something that seemed possible.”

It’s an obstacle still faced by many women in STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But it’s one they believe can be overcome by seeing people who look like them at the front of the classroom and in the laboratory.

“The more you get into the layers of intersectionality, the harder it gets to see yourself being represented,” says Javiera Gutierrez Duran. She is a part of University of Toronto’s Women in Science and Engineering organization, known as WISE. The group’s purpose is to expose students to other women in STEM fields, who have been on this journey before – and succeeded.

In the 2017-2018 academic year, women were almost equally represented in STEM courses at U of T at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. But a study released by Statistics Canada in 2019 noted “women with STEM credentials were less likely than their male counterparts to persist in STEM occupations between 2006 and 2016.” It offered possible explanations such as cultural pressures related to parental expectations and a lack of female role models.

“It’s also hard to be the person who’s representing people,” Gutierrez Duran says. “The more women we have breaking barriers in the same field, the easier it will get.”

Showcasing career paths that young girls can see themselves in is one focus of Minakshi Suri’s work as an engineering outreach coordinator at Ryerson University.

The program aims to provide students between kindergarten and grade 12 broader access to information about future career paths.

As Suri notes, female participation in STEM is key for innovation to be inclusive. But that will never happen, she says, if the workforce doesn’t match the population being served.

“There’s one question I ask during my presentations,” Suri says. “‘What does an engineer look like?’ I’ve had [young girls] be absolutely outraged by the question and they’ve been like, ‘Anyone can look like it.'”

But Suri says when women and girls don’t know people in their families or communities working in STEM, they’re more likely to “self-select out.”

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” she says.

For Maxwell, whose lab is predominately female, the goal is to empower her students to seize the opportunities that she too was blind to as a graduate student.

“I try to have those conversations with the woman in my lab and talk about what it’s like to be a mother and to be a scientist at the same time.”