How to Get Girls to Try Tech? Listen Here

By April Laissle

 

 
As the start of the school year nears, educators continue to grapple with how to get girls interested in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all fields in which women are underrepresented. One Bay Area organization says it's found the secret in sound.

Women's Audio Mission is a nonprofit that offers free audio engineering and recording arts classes to women and low-income girls.

"This is a way to connect creativity to technology," says Terri Winston, who founded the Mission District group in 2003. "That's a proven way to get girls interested in technology -- you have to link it to some social need or impact, or something that's creative. They won't just work with a gadget just because it's a gadget."

Winston set up the program to mirror her own journey into engineering. She started out as a musician, but switched gears after spending time behind the scenes working with the recording equipment. She's worked with bands like the Flaming Lips and the Pixies, and created music for TV shows and commercials.

All in all, she's spent more than 20 years in the music industry. A lot has changed in that time, but one big thing hasn’t. Women still make up only about 5 percent of all audio engineers.

Winston says she knows one reason why the statistics are so low.

"It's like 99 percent have never heard of these careers before," Winston says. "So it's like, 'Wow, I didn't even know this was a job.' So we can tell them, and we can have people come in and say, 'This is what I do, this is my job,' and they're like, 'Wow, you can do this every day?' "

Twice a week, six middle school girls come to WAM’s studio to work on several small projects to get a feel for the recording arts. They create podcasts, record music and engineer the sound for cartoons.

Winston says that by the end of the program, nearly 90 percent of the students say they want to pursue careers in science and technology.

While it's difficult for Women's Audio Mission to track students’ career paths through high school, Winston says WAM is starting to get through to them.

“We’re finally getting them to the point where they’re attracted to the gear and the gadgets, and not pushed away from it," said Winston.

For WAM, the next step is expansion. The group want to replicate the program online so more girls will have access to it. Google recently awarded a Google Glass headset. People at WAM plan to use the wearable computer to live-stream videos of their in-studio classes to girls nationwide.