My Reflections…

“As more children join the C2L Club and we move from exploring one topic to another, the energy levels and interactions between the kids is at an all time high! The kids continue to tinker with the experiments through the week, improve upon the setups, explore the possibilites and share their achievements. The confidence with which they approach a situation and think through it in logical steps in order to come up with possible answers is delightful ?

At the same time, I am getting a bit uncomfortable with my own observation in another direction. The number of girls to boys in the sessions is disappointingly low… Being a scientist, a woman and a mother to a young girl (I don’t like the term woman scientist coz a scientist is a scientist, man or woman is immaterial), I strongly believe that we need to encourage more and more girls towards STEM subjects and careers. Not only are they as capable as anyone else, we need both women AND men to face the challenges of our future world! Women not only have a higher emotional quotient, their problem-solving approach and vision is very different from men’s, which is essential to shape our ever-changing modern world.

Why is it that there are so few girls pursuing STEM subjects? What/who is the biggest issue? Is it the parents who feel that it is not a necessary and important career choice for the girls (and unfortunately, I have come across quite a few…) or is it the societal sterotypes that have evolved over the years or is it all of us not taking up the responsibility to do our bit in narrowing this worrying gender gap?…”