Being a Woman in STEM is not as glamorous as it seems.

By Mikayla J., 16

Credit: NASA; Annie Easley

This summer, I did a STEM program online. We were tasked with making a medical innovation presentation, pitching it, and making a prototype design. We decided to do something regarding skin tissue regeneration, which was my idea. He pushed his idea of doing transplant innovation, which all the other teams were doing, and continuously belittled me, by saying that he didn't see how my idea was viable, or that his idea was "more substantial". It took a meeting with the instructor of the course and a vote with my other teammates for him back down, but he didn't.

When we were deciding on roles, he immediately said that he wanted to be the Chief Executive Officer. Another girl in my group spoke up, and said it should've been me, and he shot her down, saying that the CEO should be someone with strong presentation skills. Ouch. But not wanting to make any drama (at this point, I had given up), I decided that I would just be the CSO, the Chief Scientific Officer. At some point, everything seemed to be going smoothly. We finished the presentation (a lot of the work being done by me), and the script (fully formatted by me). In divvying up the slides, he took the most amount.

During the Q&A, he also talked over me, filling up the time and space with answers that made little sense. Although it frustrated me to see this, it was something I felt I didn't have the energy to address.

I was 12 when I entered my first robotics competition. In my town, there weren't a lot of girls who were interested in STEM, and in this competition, I was the only girl. The male coach once had told me that if I felt uncomfortable, then I was welcome to leave - but he overly scrutinized me every time I made a mistake. Once, another boy messed up our entire submission, and our coach took his anger out on me. I'm afraid of getting my work stolen, of putting all my time and energy into something that will be put under a mans name. I don't want to spend the rest of my life being belitted or looked down upon, but my experience with STEM, although I love the design and collaborative aspects of STEM, have been mostly negative due to the sexism I've experienced.