Catalyze August 2022

THE IMPORTANCE OF
DIVERSITY IN STEM
S H E R I H A S H E M I
I am wholeheartedly behind and work towards
sustainable development goal five - empowering
women and girls. I was just looking up the
numbers, and I have a few friends in the research
program with me who are focusing on women as
well as diverse candidates. I think it's like 25-28% of
the STEM - science, technology, engineering, math
- community and occupations that are female. And
so that's such a small number if you think about
what ideas are held by individual people and
personalities and perspectives. So you're really just
getting a
limited perspective on how folks view those lenses, like how you look at a problem.
You're only getting 25% of your possible input. Maybe there are more solutions in
there. Getting candidates of diverse nature and of diverse backgrounds and
perspectives and education and experiences is a really great way of tackling some
of these problems because when you look at a problem for so long, it just inherently
becomes part of the problem. And you might just forget to tell somebody, so when
you get into a new experience with someone who's not necessarily familiar, you
share that perspective, and those elements that might get missed or assumed can
resurface and come back. So these problems fuel more sustainable sources as folks
are really pushing the envelope on commercial space flight and putting people into
lower earth orbit. I really believe that there's a subset of those solutions, and they're
in those folks' heads who were not necessarily being able to incorporate them. And
by going after that and through sustainable development goal five empowering
women and girls, you're going to end up helping elevate and increase that
perspective to solve those problems.
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