We (Still) Need More Women in STEM

When my mind wanders at Harvard, I often think about the students who came before me. Perhaps J. Robert Oppenheimer, Class of 1925, ate dinner in my House’s dining hall, or Natalie Portman ’03 sat in the same seat as me in Memorial Hall.

In a recent, astronomy-focused lecture, my mind drifted to the Harvard Computers.

The Harvard computers were a group of more than 80 women hired by Harvard professor Edward C. Pickering, Class of 1865, to analyze astronomical images. They were called computers because they did tedious mathematical computations by hand, work that has now been replaced by modern computers.

Their work led to a new classification system for stars, and was critical to the advancement of the field. Despite their intellect and computational acumen, they were overworked, significantly underpaid, and unrecognized — all because they were women.

Yet, many continued this work, holding fast to the valuable opportunity it provided them to engage in the sciences.

Sitting in classrooms not unlike those in which these women worked, it is easy to forget their struggles. They seem foreign to me, as I attend science classes taught by incredible female professors, and interact with brilliant female research mentors and peers.

While this no doubt reflects strides toward gender equity in STEM fields, I saw the limits of this progress recently when I helped to host the Harvard Women Engineers Code conference. Held annually, the WECode conference brings together hundreds of female undergraduates interested in computer science from around the world to learn more about technology from leading women in the field.

What surprised me about these attendees is how incredibly eager they were to be there. Many cited this weekend event as a novel opportunity to meet other women in tech — the first time, some indicated, that they truly felt a part of a community in STEM.

This was startling. If we have really made science more accessible to women, why do so many still feel left out? The truth is that existing progress still isn’t enough.

It is no secret that women still make up a minority of many science fields, including computer science, engineering, and chemistry. Moreover, women in STEM still earn less than men in equivalent positions: A recent study demonstrated that female tenure-track faculty were compensated less for their research than men in several top research institutions, with some earning thousands of dollars less than men with equivalent research productivity. This structural undervaluation could contribute to women feeling unwelcome in science.

Underrepresentation of women in STEM could also result from societal norms. If girls are underestimated and discouraged from pursuing science and math at a young age, they may be less likely to one day pursue careers in these fields. (Indeed, many women who do then face bias and sexism.)

There has been some success though in changing this perception for young girls. Some activists and trailblazers, for example, have publicly rejected the phenomenon of “pinkification,” the exposure of young girls to everything pink and “girly,” pushing to redefine what it means to be feminine.

Other challenges to women in STEM are more concrete, including insufficient maternity leave and lack of work-life balance. So long as women are expected to dedicate their time to housework and childcare — as was the norm in the early 20th century and is still the norm in many countries — it will be significantly more difficult for them to compete with their male counterparts to explore and succeed in STEM careers.

As we celebrate Women’s History Month, I am especially appreciative of women like the Harvard computers, who quietly set a precedent that made it easier for students like myself to participate in science.

More than anything, though, I am reminded by the computers that there is more work to be done to make STEM truly equitable — to allow the next generation of women to be valued as more than just computers.

Sandhya Kumar ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.