By Bernadette Andrietti, VP Marketing Director EMEA, Intel
This week, the world’s largest international pre-college science competition Intel ISEF will bring together 1700 bright young scientists from around the world to showcase their research in Los Angeles, California. Their ideas are ranging from election voting system for blind people, to medicine that stops bleeding when applied to any wound. Finalists told me that they especiallywelcome the opportunity to meet and exchange with fellow students from across the world as well as to talk to Nobel Laureates or leading university professors, scientists, mathematicians and engineers in their field.
Of special interest to me are the insights gleaned from our female finalists. Our industry is known for its lack of female employees, particularly those in top roles and we at Intel are committed to change this. While our competition still has more male finalists (55%), than female (45%), it is good to see that the gap is fairly small, but I am looking forward to the girl taking over from the boys.
We tried to understand, who got the most influence on them to engage with science. Interestingly, 42% of female finalists said that a mentor was the biggest influence on them, compared to 33% that cited a family member as most influential. When we were younger, my father told my brother to become an engineer. He told me to become a teacher. As it turns out I trained as an engineer and my brother became a teacher. As we are both very happy with our careers, this shows me that inspiration needs to come from all over the place. We should all be encouraging children to explore their curiosity, and I would like to encourage more young people to become interested in science and maths, not mainly the ones with a family member already in a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) career. As we can witness here in Los Angeles this week, scientific engagement coupled with the motivation to make a difference can be very rewarding.
Interestingly, our data reveals that female finalists are almost twice as likely to be self-motivated (15%) than male finalists (9%). I’d like the percentage to be much higher for both sexes, as self-motivation is one of the most important attributes needed for success. Perhaps this calls upon mentors to encourage self-motivation amongst their mentees.
It is clear that there are a great deal of female and male scientifically talented minds out there, and I am really excited by the quality and creativity of the great ideas put forward by our ISEF finalists. This year’s finalist ideas are an overwhelming and powerful demonstration of how these young students apply technology and scientific thinking to tackle some of the major global challenges we are facing and to improve people’s lives.
By recognising and rewarding young talent we hope to encourage and help students to follow a STEM career path and to turn into ambassadors for those careers – regardless of their gender.