GENDER REPRESENTATION IN THE WORKPLACE

 If you closed your eyes right now and thought of the first scientist or business executive that came to your mind, who would you think of? Whether you pictured Albert Einstein or Mark Zuckerberg, chances are, you thought of a man. In the science, technology, engineering, math, and business professional industries, a majority of the employees are men.
 

Our names are Ella and Ari, and we are exploring what obstacles women in underrepresented fields have to face in the workplace. We want to know why certain fields are male-dominated, to see what it is like to work in those places as a woman, and how it affects their lives in and out of work. We are high school seniors and we both want to go into underrepresented fields in the future, so this is a topic that hits home with us. We feel privileged to go to school in a community that encourages us to go into the careers that we are interested in, without discrimination because of our gender. However, we know that we live in a world full of inequality and injustice for women. 
 

The world that we live in today consists of a sexist president openly objectifying women, men being in the top jobs in the workplace, and young girls questioning their self worth. Women face constant barriers that they have to overcome just to be equal with their male counterparts. Through this project, we want to show that girls can do anything they want even if there are more men doing it today. We wanted to specifically direct this project at girls who are second guessing their choice of career just because their gender is underrepresented in it. 
 

To start off our project and our research we wanted to interview some female employees about their experiences in an engineering workplace and as they went through school. Ari had an internship at Braskem, a petrochemical engineering corporation based in Brazil with a branch in Philadelphia, so we started there.
 

We were able to interview some female employees at the corporate office in Center City Philadelphia and a few at their petrochemical plant, just south of Philadelphia, in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, which totaled to eight different women. The interviewees were comprised of process engineers, chemical engineers, project managers, and many more jobs from the STEM field.

 

Before conducting interviews, we had a very negative perspective of how women are treated in STEM workplaces. However, after talking to these intelligent women, we realized that even though the ratio of men to women might be unequal, if you work in the right place, you won’t be treated as unequal. We didn’t hear many negative experiences, which was a good thing, but it did change the direction of our project. Instead, we were able to make a very inspiring documentary about strong women that are working to uplift each other in an underrepresented setting.
 

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any places where women are being treated unjustly in an underrepresented field, but our interviews have shown us that things might just be changing for the better. Out of all of the women we interviewed at braskem, only a few had experiences being marginalized because of their gender either in school or in their careers. After having had the chance to talk to these strong women, we were more excited than ever to continue our project and to start our careers in underrepresented fields.