They seek to reduce gender inequality in science and technology

In the context of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), through coordination for gender equality, and start Epic Queen held the 1st Festival for Girls in Science and Technology to inspire and contribute to narrowing the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. According to coordination data, women’s participation in undergraduate and postgraduate degrees related to engineering, mathematics and technology is less than 40 percent.

Fernanda Lopez, Executive Assistant for Inclusion and Community Practices for Coordination for Gender Equality at UNAM, and Anna Karen Ramirez, Founder and CEO of Epic Queen, spoke to M2 about this free virtual event that started yesterday and will end today.

“This event arose out of the need to note gender biases in the payroll of science majors and all those that make up STEM, and these biases have been observed in undergraduate admission which become a consecutive phenomenon, MA, PhD; so we want to hide this gap between men and women.” Fernanda Lopez, confirmed.

“We can say that there are still prejudices and they are described as feminine and masculine professions, we want to remove those gender stereotypes because in the collective imagination women are said to be better at care, for the arts and cooking, and this greatly encourages their integration into psychology, social work and nursing, so we want Eliminate this with the new generations, “Lopez added.

There are figures that confirm these facts: of the degree in mechanical engineering only 9.1% of all students are female, in electrical and electronic engineering the figure is 11.2%; At the graduate level, in PhD and Master of Science (Physics), there are only 10.1% and 11.8% women, respectively.

“We have identified that there is a big problem in this regard, we must start transforming it because exactly the world is changing, we must adapt to the revolution;” Anna Karen said, “If we are not as women in this matter, then we will really fall behind and it will affect us because we are for a while. We were not in these areas for a long time. “

He added: “Technology and machine intelligence are advancing, and the epidemic has alerted us that we need many creators of technology, and it is clear that science and scientists are what we need most.”

Keys

The participants

Julieta Fierro, scientific communication specialist and astronomer; Ansofia Sanchez, CEO, Waze Mexico; Paula Escalante, Head of Creative Shop Facebook Anna Elena Escalante, Director of the Environment Institute at UNAM; Pilar Carrion, director of the Institute of Nuclear Sciences, and Catalina Stern, director of the College of Science.