GE tackles gender inequity in STEM with summer camp for middle school girls

Last week, GE hosted its ninth annual free summer camp for middle school girls in the South Bend Community School Cooperation (SBCSC) that introduces students to real-life STEM concepts and jobs through a week of activities.

The hope is to fill the gap of women working in GE, but also more generally, to show young girls that they can work in STEM fields, camp co-lead and GE Aviation Senior Operations Leader Meehan Lenzen said.

“What I've noticed is there's so many more leadership positions at GE, and I want to, hopefully, fill those with women,” she said.

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A 2021 Pew Research report showed that women comprised 50% of the STEM workforce in the U.S. but that they heavily dominate the healthcare industry, making up 75% of it. Meanwhile, women account for only 25% of computer operations and 15% of engineering roles.

Within GE, 21.9% of its global employees are women, according to a 2020 diversity report. 

Originally, the GE Girls camp, held at Notre Dame and one of many national camps funded by GE, was going to be advertised to high school girls, because college professors said that introducing them to STEM activities when they were younger would increase the number of women pursuing college degrees in STEM.

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But, Lenzen said, when GE representatives went to talk to high school teachers about the camp, they told them to hold it specifically for middle school girls due to more and more high schools allowing students to choose what types of classes they take.

SBCSC runs its high schools as magnet programs, meaning students can apply to any of the specialized programs as middle schoolers and dive deeper into certain fields. The varying secondary education curricula are International Baccalaureate, computer science and engineering, medical and allied health science, and visual and performing arts, each offered at one of the district’s four high schools.

“A lot of the country is moving to where kids have a choice in terms of what classes they take in high school,” Lenzen says, “and so we want them to be excited about science and math, not afraid of it.”

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At last week’s camp, four area middle schools were represented by campers. Camp organizers aim for 50 students and this year they hit 45 — the highest attendance to date.

The camp coming to Notre Dame and South Bend wasn’t a coincidence — it’s personal. Lenzen graduated from the university in 2011 with a degree in environmental sciences, and camp leaders fly in from across the country to come back to their alma mater and volunteer their time.

Leylah Almonte and Ainsley Gray, friends and classmates at Jefferson Middle School, sat next to each other last Wednesday as they both built solar-powered cars, the morning activity for the day.

The solar car activity gave students a chance to learn about renewable energy while engaging in a hands-on project. The girls also got to take home everything they built during the week.

Leylah said that as rising eighth graders, they would both be too old to attend the camp next year. But just halfway through the week, she had gained an interest in STEM, saying she particularly enjoyed the 3-D printing activity. For her 3-D project, she chose to print a mushroom with her initials on it after deciding that printing the popular culture character Stitch would be too complex.

“At first, it was just for fun, but now I think I’d actually like to go here because the printers and technology stuff — those were all really cool,” Leylah said.

Lenzen has been involved in the GE camp at Notre Dame for nine years and has been at GE for 11. Although there may be a long way to go, she says she's seen the number of women in engineering roles at GE drastically increase, personally has had more women mentors and has seen more employees hired who are women.

“We've kept in touch with several of the girls who were in the first and second classes, and there are a lot of them who have gone on to do engineering degrees,” Lenzen said. “Some have, some haven't. But our goal is really not to 100% convert them to engineering majors, but we want them to know it's an option.”

Email Alysa Guffey at aguffey1@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @AlysaGuffeyNews.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Summer camp: GE South Bend Camp for STEM welcomes middle school girls