According to Corbett and Hill (2015), women represent the single largest economic force constituting 48 percent of the total global workforce as well as earn more college degrees compared to men, yet they are less professionally engaged in STEM-related fields. This implies that most of the products available and part of women’s daily life have been developed without their input – input from the large percentage of the global population. However, the addition of diversity to STEM-related projects results in enhanced innovation and creativity driven by diversified perspectives regarding the underlying problems and how to solve them. Lewis (2015) confirms that women in STEM careers have impacted greatly on people’s life. For example, although airbags were designed to protect people in general, they were specifically modeled and designed on adult males’ point of view to protect them without prior considerations of how to protect smaller female bodies or even children. However, the involvement of women engineers led to the introduction of new concepts and perspectives that were all inclusive hence making a difference in product safety. Besides, the preferences of women can have great implications in product development. Some programs such as PBS SciGirls confirms that some girls are engaged in designing and programming robots which have emotions such as empathy. The robots can be useful in emergency management through rescuing people in disaster situations where humans cannot reach. As such, it is simply impractical to ignore the perspectives of women in future technical designs and engineering of products hence the need to get more women into STEM careers ( Smith, 2011) .
Secondly, women’s health is another major reason that should be considered important for increasing women in STEM careers for effective, unbiased study and product development. Participation of women in technological and scientific processes could result in improved utilization of products and solutions created as well as the success of their applications in the medical field. This primarily entails the inclusion of women’s abilities and perspectives to enrich the insight and creativity of the product as well as the potentialities of pure innovation ( Smith, 2011) . For instance, for decades the development testing of drugs was often done solely on men, and hence the medication sometimes failed to work on women who have a different physiological configuration altogether. Such drugs resulted in fatal and alarming medical outcomes such heart arrhythmias from antihistamine prescribed to women . Furthermore , not until a while ago when women suffering from cardiovascular diseases were misdiagnosed with the symptoms they manifested and sent home with wrong medications only to cause fatal health implications. Other medications also had high side effects on women ( Wang & Degol, 2017) . However, Lewis (2015) asserts that involvement and increasing the number of women in STEM-related careers such as biomedical research has resulted in change on this model that has been used for generations to design drugs and other related products focusing on men only and failing to recognize that inclusion of sex as a variable for test purposes could change everything.
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On the other hand, the fact that there are few women in STEM-related have widened sexual discrimination, economic marginalization, and unconceived bias gaps resulting into more entrenchment of these concepts in the modern society which works against women in workplaces ( Lewis, 2015) . Therefore, to eradicate and shift paradigms of such biases and misconceptions it is it important to get more women into STEM careers and create role models for future generations of young girls interested in science and technology fields. For example, despite the largest global users of the internet being women, there is an alarming trend of women falling behind in information technology as well as learning computer science degrees due to the misconception that it is a competitive and men dominated field without chances for women to thrive. However, Smith (2011) study reveals that organizations that have previously employed women in STEM careers consistently outperformed their competitors.
References
Corbett, C., & Hill, C. (2015). Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women's Success in
Engineering and Computing . American Association of University Women. 1111 Sixteenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036.
Lewis, D. (2015). Increasing diversity and inclusion for women in STEM. Notices of the
American Mathematical Society , 62 (8).
Smith, E. (2011). Women into science and engineering? Gendered participation in higher
education STEM subjects. British Educational Research Journal , 37 (6), 993-1014.
Wang, M. T., & Degol, J. L. (2017). Gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (STEM): Current knowledge, implications for practice, policy, and future directions. Educational Psychology Review , 29 (1), 119-140.
