EDUCATION
Nicola Findlay
Pupils from Calderglen High were all fired up and ready to go recently.
Some 37 girls from S4 and S5 took part in a Monster Confidence workshop in conjunction with Stemettes – an organisation that puts girls in contact with women working in science, tech, engineering and maths industries.
It is widely recognised that jobs within Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) aren’t attractive to girls.
Stemettes was created to try to encourage more proportionate representation of females in STEM jobs (currently at 14 per cent) and aims to increase this to be nearer a third of the workforce.
Over 200 girls took part in the event at Glasgow University.
By teaming up with job website Monster. co.uk the Stemettes are on a mission to encourage more girls to become creators and not passive users of new technologies.
The fun got off to a flying start with the girls actively encouraged to switch on their phones to send tweets and post to Instagram as they packed in a whirlwind morning of presentations, workshops on skills, confidence and interview skills and met with a range of mentors from industries as diverse as zoology, astrophysics, construction engineering and biomedical engineering.
Inspired by keynote speaker Professor Muffy Calder OBE, the girls were encouraged to face up to the challenges of the 21st century and address major problems such as transportation, energy and climate change.
Motivational speaker and fellow Stemette Sinead Bunting, a former Harvard student and EU Marketing Director, impassioned her audience that a career in coding can be hugely interesting, rewarding and that coding and technology are fundamental Just the job