Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract/Objectives
Although more and more women now devote to STEM, the proportion is still deficient. For most young girls, STEM is still an unfamiliar field. Traditional society and people still hold the view of “STEM scientists and engineers are mostly men, and they usually sit in boring laboratories and do tedious experiments.” In order to make more girls interested in the STEM field and to change the disadvantaged situation of women in STEM, this project focuses on promoting the cultivation of female STEM talents, holding girl maker activities, and providing young girls with interesting and educational cross-disciplinary knowledge of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and its wide application. The activities include science and engineering, information communication, electrical engineering, life sciences, energy, and nanometer fields. We hope to provide K12 female students with more learning opportunities in diversified science and engineering fields. Besides, increasing women’s opportunities to engage in various scientific fields is also one of our goals. We hope that this project could encourage female students interested in learning science and willing to choose science fields as their career goals. The implementation of this project can enhance the skills and participation of domestic women in the STEM field. Moreover, it might reverse the general public’s stereotypes that men are good at science and technology while women are good at literature and business. This project will possibly increase the proportion of women engaging in the science industry and change the current male-dominated state in the technology industry. We work towards the following goals: 1. Reach the consensus of science, technology, and STEM regardless of gender; 2. Reduce women’s rejection of STEM and increase acceptance; 3. Encourage women to invest in science, technology, and STEM-related industries to increase overall output value; 4. Let STEM take root in the hearts of students as early as possible; 5. Let learning STEM gradually become a national movement; 6. Women of new immigrants and their children will increase their exposure to science, technology, and STEM... etc.
Results/Contributions

In addition to continuous promotion of STEM education activities, which have been carried out from the previous project “Girls Power Age! STEM turns your future around!”, some new plans are added to this years’ project to include more features and highlights, with expectations to achieve the goal of gender equality in STEM education:

1.Hold events on International Day of Women and Girls in Science annually. An agreement has been reached with Big City, a shopping mall in Hsinchu downtown, that the event will be held annually in the future. According to UNESCO and UN Women, February 11th was set as International Day of Women and Girls in Science in 2017.

2.Make films that include popular features and lightning round plots, such as One-day Vlog of a female scientist and Youth Shout-out through YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

3. Hold STEM-related open house and hands-on lab events with topics for the time being. Work with other units to achieve interdisciplinary cooperation.

4. Include popular topics such as AI and traditional energy vs. green energy in promotion to keep up with the latest trend.

5. Hold Fun Science events for immigrants and their children, with topics that relate to their traditional culture and festivals. Make participants realize that science is closely connected to their life.

Keywords
STEM educationGender in science and technologyArtificial intelligence technologyEducation promotionInternational Day of Women and Girls in ScienceInternational Girls in ICTYouTube channel of popular scienceLive-streaming knowledge sharing
References
Contact Information
戴明鳳
mftai@phys.nthu.edu.tw