Feeling “really alone and disconnected” in her dorm room, she reached out to an instructor with the Flexus program within the University of Maryland, College Park’s Clark School of Engineering, where female students live and learn together.
The instructor connected Hernández to another student feeling similarly isolated, and she made it over those difficult days to thrive at the school, ultimately mentoring other students, joining groups like Women in Engineering and winning the Clark school’s student service award when she graduated last year.
“There was a really good support group,” Hernández said. “It would have been hard without it.”
Hernández, whose mother is also an engineer, now works as a structural engineer at Whitman, Requardt and Associates in Fells Point. She may well have succeeded even without the boost from Flexus and other programs. But increasingly, those in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math are seeking ways to support women as a way of addressing a chronic retention problem: Compared with other professions, women tend to drop out of STEM at a higher rate than in other fields, whether it’s during college or in the workforce.
Fewer female than male college students major in STEM to begin with, and they’re less likely to stick with it, get a first job in the field or remain there as long, according to multiple studies, including one with the spot-on title of “Bye Bye Ms. American Sci: Women and the Leaky STEM Pipeline.”
The reasons range widely, experts say, from women facing the lingering, ages-old stereotype that boys are better at math and science, to the women lacking role models both in their college faculties and the leadership ranks of workplaces, to the difficulty of carving out time to have children and maintain a work-life balance.
“The culture of STEM was designed historically for men with a wife at home,” said Phyllis Robinson, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “It’s a rough-and-tumble enterprise. The practice of science is pretty time-consuming, and it’s pretty gendered.”
Still, Robinson, who created the UMBC faculty group WISE, for Women in Science and Engineering, there’s been “a huge change in the environment for STEM women” over the years.
There are differences within the fields — Robinson said her own is considered the “kindest,” and indeed more women than men earn undergraduate biology degrees. But moving up in the postgraduate ranks, they again increasingly lose their share: They constitute less than a third of tenure-track professors in the life sciences and just over a fourth of the full professor positions.
Other STEM fields, such as computer science, have even fewer women, with just over 20 percent of undergraduate degrees going to them.
“It can be very isolating,” said Carolyn Seaman, a professor of information systems and director of the Center for Women in Technology at UMBC. “In classes, you’re not seeing anyone who looks like you.”
CWiT, as it is known, offers what’s jokingly known as a “concierge service” to support undergrads in computing and engineering with scholarships, community building events and peer, faculty and industry mentoring — all of which have been found to help with retention.
“Female students are socialized early on that tech is not for them,” Seaman said. “When it becomes hard — it’s hard for everyone, this is hard stuff — if you don’t have that support structure, you are still getting the message that you don’t belong here. The impostor syndrome is huge.”
At College Park, programs like Flexus seek to provide that kind of support structure. (There’s also a program for male students called Virtus.)
“It extends beyond the classroom, said Jen Kuntz, assistant director of the Women in Engineering at the Clark engineering school. “We provide our students with academic but also a social experience, and that’s been shown to help with retention.”
Research has also shown that women are more likely to stay in STEM if they feel they’re working toward a shared purpose with their colleagues and that their work contributes to making a difference in people’s lives.
“It’s a socialization kind of thing. You’re raised to care for other people,” said Elyse Hill, an aerospace engineer at NASA who had received a CWiT scholarship to go to UMBC.
CWiT alums like Hill, a Waldorf native, said the community is tight, often living together on a designated floor in a dorm, and remaining so after graduation.
“We traveled in a pack,” she said, “whether it was doing homework together or just going to dinner.”
While she has had both male and female mentors, Hill said the latter offered an added perspective on the experience of being a woman in a “more impersonal” area like engineering.
Now, she tries to give back by serving as an industry mentor, speaking on panels and making herself available to students or those entering the workforce.
To better understand what would help keep more women in the field, Gili Freedman, an associate professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College, wanted to go straight to the source. Her study, “Dear future women of STEM: letters of advice from women of STEM,” published in 2023, is based on advice juniors and seniors majoring in the sciences were asked to give to their younger counterparts.
Among the main messages? “Everyone struggles,” Freedman said. “Failure doesn’t make you a failure.”
Freedman said women in the sciences face deeply entrenched stereotypes about brilliance. As early as the age of 6, girls are less likely than boys to say members of their own gender are “really, really smart” and start avoiding activities they associate with braininess.
“We associate STEM fields with brilliance,” Freedman said, “and society also associates men with brilliance.”
Carol Wong remembers being told by a classmate at UMCP, where she was in an honors program and received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, that the professor liked her only because she was female.
“I didn’t fall for that,” said Wong, 39, who was in an honors program and went on to get a master’s at Stanford. “I understood the work. I asked questions in class.”
Wong, a senior water resources engineer for the Fulton-based nonprofit Center for Watershed Protection, said she’s seen the retention problem for women in STEM up close: About half her female engineering friends have left the field over the years.
But that’s not entirely negative, she said.
“People recruit engineers for non-engineering jobs. They like the way engineers think and process information,” Wong said.
Engineering tends to be less flexible than other jobs, which can be a factor when a woman decides to start a family, said Wong, who was born and raised in Howard County.
“Your projects are multiyear,” Wong said, making it harder to “take yourself out of the field. “There’s still a stigma when you have a gap in work.”
Although childless herself, she finds that the nonprofit sector can be more family-friendly and works with several women who are mothers and who continue to work, sometimes part time.
Julie J. Park, an education professor at UMCP who has studied how to retain women in STEM fields, said there remains a lack of “structural support for women who want to have families.”
“It’s one step forward, two steps back,” she said. “There’s greater awareness of the problem … but you’re fighting against these entrenched cultures.”
LaDawn Partlow grew up in Northeast Baltimore and “didn’t know anything out of Baltimore.” Luckily, it was enough — she graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and went on to get her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering at Morgan State University, where she is now director of academic engagement & outreach at its Cybersecurity Assurance & Policy Center. There, she leads programs to get middle school students and especially girls interested in STEM.
She might be her own best lesson for the students.
“With me having strong ties to the community, there is someone who looks like them and who did it,” Partlow said. “They feel heard. They feel seen.”
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