Perseverance Is The Theme At PPPL's Annual Young Women's Conference In STEM

By: WE Staff | Tuesday, 1 June 2021

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory's (PPPL) Young Women's Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) featured a major theme about how women in STEM must overcome obstacles to get to where they are today.

Deedee Ortiz, PPPL's Science Education programme manager, faced numerous challenges in hosting the conference virtually this year after it was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She collaborated with Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) to create a virtual platform and persuaded many of the researchers and organisations who had previously participated in-person to join the virtual event.

More than 400 seventh- to tenth-graders attended the virtual conference on May 7, where they saw chemistry demonstrations by Kathryn Wagner, a lecturer and outreach director in chemistry at Princeton University; learned about forensics at the always popular FBI booth; watched live and videotaped plasma demonstrations at PPPL's booth; and listened to live panel discussions by women in science, and hear a keynote address by plasma physicist and professor Steffi Diem from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The conference is supported by the Office of Science Fusion Energy Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Being home for classes for an entire year was certainly challenging for students and the fact that we could get together to see all these women scientists who are working hard and doing what they want to do in the future just brought that sense of camaraderie,” Ortiz said. “I got emails from teachers and students saying how grateful they were to attend. It just put the spark back in their STEM future that they can still do this.”

The conference's primary goal is to encourage young women to pursue careers in STEM fields where women continue to lag behind men. While women earn 58 percent of all bachelor's degrees, they only account for 36 percent of STEM bachelor's degrees.

Women hold 60percent of social science occupations and 48percent of life science occupations, but only 26percent of computer and mathematical science occupations and 13percent of engineering occupations, according to the National Science Foundation.