My Experience at a STEM Middle School: a Notoriously Sexist Field in a Notoriously Immature Environment

Picture this: it’s my first day of middle school. It’s that awkward age where you’re transitioning from tank tops to training bras, scented deodorant to PINK body spray, and trying to figure out if you should be shaving your legs. Your insecurities are at their worst, your social skills are at their awkwardest, but you’re innocent enough to be severely influenced by your surroundings. 

My first day of middle school was spent in a hot and stuffy middle school room, but it wasn’t filled with the fear of having different teachers for different classes and making it to rooms across the building in time like many other middle schoolers. I had been accepted into a STEM program that had the goal of building problem-solving and group work skills with a class of around 30 students. My next three years would be spent building simple machines, designing and engineering future cities, and learning how to use tools to create anything from Rube Goldberg machines to catapults to rubber-band-powered cars. The only thing was, the class composition was…rough, to say the least. Five other girls and I were surrounded by 23 smelly, awkward, and nerdy STEM boys. 

I now joke about how my three years in a STEM school were basically for nothing, because I’m now studying solely humanities and rarely apply my power saw or mechanics skills to my life. But, as I’ve been reflecting on my previous school experiences, I’ve realized that those three years mattered a lot more than I’d like to admit in terms of my development. 

An Extreme Boy to Girl Ratio In The Worst Environment Possible

First, I need to include a disclaimer that I have nothing but respect for many of now-grown men in my class, as well as the teachers. However, it is not comparable to the respect I have for the women I endured this experience with.

My time in STEM left me with a couple issues I like to call “complexes”. The boys in my class, while I know a few have grown up into kind and respectable men, were… middle school boys at the time, but all of their boyish behaviors were emphasized because of how many of them there were. There were fewer girls for them to feel awkward around, especially once we got to know each other by the end of eighth grade, and more people to reinforce any sexist or harmful behavior that ensued. But, because of the ratio of boys to girls, everything they said was normalized and encouraged. Even the things that really shouldn’t have been. 

Let’s start with appearances. There are still comments that ring in my head from my time in an overly masculine and under supervised adolescent environment. I had acne in middle school (as almost everyone does), and once or twice I was called a “pizza face” by one of my classmates. Although I laughed it off and I don’t think they had malicious intent (they just didn’t know how to interact with anyone besides other middle school boys and insults like that ran rampant among guy friend groups

) it was definitely bullying that got brushed under the rug because of the environment it was bred in. And, to this day, any time I get a single pimple, even one on a perfectly clear face, I spend way too much time treating it, hiding it, and being pushed into a level of middle school insecurity that I’ve spent six years trying to grow out of. And that’s just one of the comments pushed my way. 

One time, one of them brought a tape measure to my shorts, measured them, and told me that they were too short for school. And although I now know how incredibly sexist that was, there’s still a voice nagging in the back of my head whenever I put anything slightly revealing on: the idea of femininity, short shorts, and dressing and acting like anything but the boys around us was associated with being lesser than, stupider than, and more annoying than. Forget learning that it’s okay to feel emotion or cry. We barely could voice our opinions without being talked over. 

Anything and everything we did that didn’t adhere to the STEM boys idea of normalcy (which, let me remind you, was dirty athletic shorts, greasy hair, not enough deodorant, too much Axe body spray, and the social skills of an ostrich) was commented on in a negative way. One of my girl classmates was called “Android” for the majority of eighth grade because she used her phone as much as any middle school girl did and liked to have it charged (yes, that should sound ridiculous to you, but her use of technology was… threatening for the boys around us? I don’t know. I really couldn’t tell you). The color of bras was commented upon. Once we learned about periods in seventh grade–yes, we had to go through Human Growth and Development in this setting–and how they begin when you hit the 100 pounds mark usually, I had boys walk up to me and ask how much I weighed to try and figure out if I had “become a woman” or not yet.  And because we were so outnumbered in the class, this behavior was completely normalized. So normalized that sometimes I laughed along. 

Women in STEM… as Supported as the Media Claims?

You may think that because there’s such a gender gap in the STEM industry the six of us would be supported extensively to make sure that we stayed in the field. However (and a conversation with my younger brother currently in the program confirmed that the issue is ongoing), our form of support was just getting us into the program and treating us the same way as the boys around us. This didn’t work. 

Throwing girls into a hypermasculine environment with no guidelines for how to teach and manage them in a way that controlled the problematic ratio of sexes led to the issues I discussed above. My old classmate and friend (one out of the six girls) pointed out that not once were we taught about any women in STEM nor the current sexism in the field. Looking back, it seems obvious that we should’ve been–maybe it would’ve helped give us more confidence after being harassed by our classmates, or maybe it would’ve helped them realize a little bit earlier that they were being assholes. 

She also pointed out how, although having such freedom in a project-based curriculum seems nice, we were never chosen to be in groups when given the choice to choose our own (which was often). It always was us girls in groups and boys in the rest, as if we weren’t smart enough to help them with their projects. Looking back, people in charge needed to make group pairings a little bit more divided–putting girls in the STEM class but not encouraging controlled interaction between us was a non-starter. 

Long story short, just throwing girls into a STEM class may start to solve the problem of the gender gap, but doing it without any other plans of making it a more welcoming environment for all types of people is just as bad as not doing anything at all. In fact, I think that out of the six girls in my class, the chance of us continuing in STEM had a close to 0% success rate. And it’s not that none of us had a knack for it: we all won in-class, regional, and state engineering competitions, built successful simple machines, and quite literally were just as good as, if not better at times, than the boys in my class.

Yet here I am, six years later, pursuing interests that I love, but couldn’t be farther from the things I studied in middle school. I do feel a definite sense of “what-if” when I take a gen-ed science class that reminds me I do actually enjoy hard sciences and am good at them when I want to be. But only then am I reminded of a once potential passion. Instead, my main takeaways from the STEM field is how unappreciated I felt, how alienated myself and my female classmates were, and how I’ve never felt that in any other academic setting (although there are definite issues of sexism in my current studies too–read about that here). 

Talking to my friends who are now in STEM fields in colleges, I’ve learned that it gets more complicated than my experiences at a collegiate level. What I do think should be taken into consideration when facing the gender gap in the STEM field is that it’s not nearly enough to throw girls, especially young girls, into a classroom of boys that are used to dominating the hard sciences without regulating the social and academic aspects of said classroom. It’s not enough to begin to allow women to work where they want without encouraging them to be feminine, outspoken, in a leadership position, or just themselves in order to maintain the masculine status quo of the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 

Who knows? Maybe if my experience in an adolescent STEM program had a little more support for the six little girls who walked into that sixth-grade classroom and held their own for three years, despite the chaotic environment full of people who didn’t really think of them as equal members of the class, I would be studying biomedical engineering (which is what I wanted to do in middle school) somewhere. Instead, I’ve found a new passion that I’m also pretty good at, and my experience with STEM is nothing more than a quick anecdote I bring up sometimes. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

• gender gap
• STEM
• women in STEM