Growing up, I changed career paths many times.
First,
I wanted to be a teacher like my mom.
And then, I wanted to be a singer, the next Taylor Swift.
Finally, I wanted to be an actress
because what 10-year-old doesn't want to be on Disney Channel.
Whatever I thought my future occupation would be,
an engineer was not it.
Engineering wasn't even on my radar.
In my opinion,
math and science weren't for girls.
They were for nerdy boys.
It sounds silly, but it's true.
When I was a kid, I imagined engineers and scientists and mathematicians
as really smart men in lab coats
discussing complex theorems, years beyond my understanding.
I thought women in STEM were anomalies.
And for a woman to be an engineer, she had to be some kind of prodigy.
And then one day,
my older stepsister told me that she wanted to be an engineer.
And I realized then that women in STEM weren't prodigies.
They could be anyone.
A female engineer doesn't have to be a prodigy,
just like a male engineer doesn't have to be a prodigy.
And I decided then that I wanted to be an engineer too.
After making the choice to follow this new career path,
I started to realize it's a whole lot easier for guys.
In most cases, from the time they develop,
boys are taught how to use tools and put things together.
They're the ones who are pushed towards cars,
and we're the ones that are pushed towards Barbies.
Toys that inspire passion to go to engineering,
like robots and Legos, are typically marketed towards boys.
And the ones marketed towards girls aren't trucks or spaceships -
they're princess castles and pet shops.
I think it's the little things that cause the gender gap
in science and math careers.
The rare little comment that girls aren't as smart as boys -
a son being taught how to fix a car while a daughter is taught how to cook.
It's nobody's fault.
We unconsciously do these things
because gender differences and inequalities are things
that have been around for a long time.
And now, they're drilled into our heads.
We solved a lot of this back in the early days
with women's suffrage and equal education.
And now it's time for us to fix the little things,
so that we can grow even closer to achieving equality.
The lack of women in STEM isn't all across the board, however.
In fact, in areas such as medical science and social science,
the ratio is actually very balanced.
But in areas that are often considered more "taxing,"
such as computer science and mathematics,
women make up about a quarter of the workforce.
I want that number to even out.
There's a constant fallacy that's spoken from the beginning:
teasing, stereotyping, marginalization.
Countless articles discuss
how women feel out of place in classes relating to STEM,
due to reasons such as other classmates mocking them
or a professor not paying as much attention to them
or a lack of other female classmates in the class.
And if gender inequality isn't a reason enough
for wanting more women involved in STEM,
take into account the scientific discoveries
that have been made by women.
Cardiovascular disease symptoms were always being based off male symptoms.
Despite the fact that it manifests very differently in men and women,
the average male is the model
for investigating diseases and designing treatment
because men were the ones doing the research.
For years, women died from incorrect diagnoses
because no one took into account
that a person's sex could have such an effect
on how a disease appeared.
Now that more women are getting more involved in medical research,
however, they themselves are taking into account these differences
and are consequently saving lives.
Women have been advancing their fields farther ahead for centuries.
Ada Lovelace created a plan for a machine
that could perform complex mathematical calculations.
She did this in the early 1800s.
It was never built during her lifetime,
but her plans were used a century later to build the world's first computers.
One of the world's first electronic computers, called the "ENIAC,"
was programmed by six female mathematicians.
Now, Amy Sheng, an engineer, is developing a smartphone attachment
called CellScope,
which allows mothers to detect ear infections in their children.
Hadiyah-Nicole Green, a medical physicist,
is designing a cancer treatment
that uses lasers to destroy cancer cells exclusively.
Despite these achievements, women are still isolated in STEM fields.
I can also get into other problems such as the gender pay gap.
But the fact is that we have made so much progress,
and yet we are still miles away from the finish line.
It's because of the internalized beliefs we don't get it,
plus it's the type for both men and for women.
Project Implicit conducted an investigation on half a million people,
and found that 70% of them
automatically associate men with science and women with the arts.
My goal is to get the word out there
that any little girl or boy can be anything they want to be,
including an engineer.
They don't have to be a prodigy to be a scientist or mathematician.
As long as they work hard,
they can be anything they would like to be.
Parents, teachers, and friends shouldn't hold them back.
They should encourage them.
I want that internalized bias to be gone
because that's what stopped me from wanting to be an engineer
when I was little.
And I don't want to stop anyone else from wanting to be an engineer ever again.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)