Send Your Daughters to Space
Today, just 21% of all scientists and 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women. The trend is improving, as women make up 41% of college science and engineering students. But many of those degrees are in the social sciences, such as psychology, and a mere 20% of engineering students are women.
Equally troubling is that while the percentage of women studying science is increasing, the overall number of Americans doing so is on the decline. By the 12th grade, U.S. students trail behind nearly every other developed nation in math and science ability.
With high-level tech outsourcing on the rise, the U.S. is losing its grip on innovation. The U.S. awards 60,000 bachelor's degrees in engineering each year--just 6% of the world's total. South Korea has one-sixth of the population and one-twentieth of the U.S.'s GDP, yet it graduates roughly the same number of engineers. China produces 220,000 engineers each year--nearly four times as many as the U.S.
Technology companies know their future depends on the cultivation of future geniuses. For its part, Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) spends $100 million annually on education. Last year more than 1,400 kids from 40 countries competed to win $3 million in scholarships in Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair. And the chipmaker has trained two and a half million teachers in 31 countries to use technology in their classrooms. Intel's Clubhouse Network has built 100 clubhouses in poor neighborhoods so kids can have a safe place to learn after school.
At the recent Sally Ride Science Festival at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the Mars Society, the Kepler Mission and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy hosted booths where girls performed simple experiments, built paper models of spacecraft and saw themselves through an infrared camera.
Representatives from Intel, IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Northrop Grumman (nyse: NOC - news - people ) and GlaxoSmithKline (nyse: GSK - news - people ) handed out brochures and described the many cool jobs available to future scientists. Those companies also sponsored workshops where girls learned about biomedical research, the DNA of strawberries and living rocks.
In the afternoon, Ride delivered an inspirational speech to a few hundred girls sitting in a grassy field. She described the eight and a half minutes of shuttle takeoff as "mind-numbing, bone-rattling and exhilarating," then shared what she saw on Earth from space: smog over Los Angeles and Tokyo, deforestation in the Amazon and coral reefs off the coast of Australia.
"Today, the astronaut corps is almost 25% female," said Ride, who was part of NASA's first effort to recruit women into the space program a quarter-century ago, "and I want that to continue to rise."
The girls in the audience, mostly in grades five through eight, are Ride's biggest concern. It is at precisely this age that girls lose interest in--or are discouraged from--studying math and science. In fourth grade, the number of girls and boys who like math and science is about the same. But by eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls show an interest in those subjects.
That translates into fewer women studying math and science in college, and even fewer going on to related roles in the workforce.
Brenda Musilli, Intel's head of education, just returned from a trip through Latin America with Chairman Craig Barrett, where she met, among other people, Columbia's minister of education. On Sunday, however, her ambassador efforts were geared toward her 11-year-old daughter Megan, whom she brought to the festival. Megan attended the Detectives in Science and DNA Discovery workshops.
"My daughter tells me science is her favorite class," says Musilli. "My focus is that she continues to think math and science are the greatest things."
After Ride's speech, dozens of wide-eyed girls shot up their arms, bounced up and down and shouted questions at Ride, who was joined by Janice Voss, astronaut and science director for the Kepler spacecraft. "What do you eat in outer space?" (Ride likes M&M's.) "What was your favorite subject in school?" (Physics and astronomy.)
In answer to "Is it fun to have no gravity?" Ride and Voss described drinking floating blobs of orange juice through a straw, Velcro-ing themselves to a vacuum-like toilet and playing weightless space Olympics inside the shuttle.
Ted Lavine, an engineer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, took his two daughters, 12-year-old Simone and 7-year-old Emily, to the festival. Simone took part in a "flies in space" workshop, while Emily, who is still too young to participate in the program, played on the grass with a friend. Says Emily, "Ooh! When I'm old enough I want to go to space camp!"
Mission accomplished.