The discrepancy between men and women in STEM fields has been widely tracked — furthermore, when women do enter STEM fields they are paid dramatically less. But in recent years there has been a push for young girls to pursue their interests in science, technology, engineering, and math and according to new information released by code.org there is reason to believe that these initiatives to get young girls interested in the fields are really working.
According to the information released, in 2007 only 2,600 girls took the AP test in computer science. Now, only 10 years later, that number has increased dramatically. In 2017, 29,000 girls took the exam. The number of minority students who took the test increased too. These changes are proof that the initiatives to encourage girls to pursue these interests is really working.
While of course this hasn't had an impact on the working world yet — these girls are still in high school after all — there is a hope that the future of STEM jobs will include more women, and hopefully higher pay for those women. If the skyrocketing numbers of how many teen girls took the AP computer science exam this year, there is no reason why that shouldn't be true.
Perhaps Melinda Gates said it best:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This might be the best graph you see all week. These students are tomorrow’s engineers, founders, & world-changers. <a href="https://t.co/t8oYZJ4XMN">https://t.co/t8oYZJ4XMN</a> <a href="https://t.co/lp6Br88063">pic.twitter.com/lp6Br88063</a></p>— Melinda Gates (@melindagates) <a href="https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/887656269200461824">July 19, 2017</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The future is female.