Students regularly visit EPFL in Lausanne, but more boys than girls opt to go

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Only 15 percent of women in Switzerland are active in information technology, and only five percent of Swiss engineers are women. This brainpower deficit is addressed in Geneva for the first time by a leading US organization in the field, in a day of workshops in English and French for girls aged 11-15 and their parents. The workshops will be held at the International School of Geneva 14 November.

Expanding your horizons (EYH) chose Geneva, Switzerland to organize its first series of workshops in Europe. It regularly runs about 90 conferences a year in Asia and the USA to introduce girls to the sciences.

Participating girls choose workshops led by women who are recognized in their fields, says Jennifer Kealy, EYH Geneva conference chairwoman. The same subjects in school may be dry, but the workshops try to give young women a taste for the uses to which science and mathematics can be put in an environment that is dynamic and fun.

EYH recognized early that women were poorly represented in  “hard” subjects like science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem). In the 1970s an informal group of women educators in the San Francisco Bay Area decided that the way to change this was to introduce girls at an early age to the possibility of considering an education in a Stem course of studies.

The EYH event includes  a forensic scientist recreating a crime scene, physicists from Cern, the European centre for nuclear research, and EPFL in Lausanne, as well as women engineers and scientists who work at Google, Procter and Gamble and almost 20 other organizations from around the region.

In Switzerland, 64 percent of students in the social sciences and humanities at university level are women, but only 36.4 percent are women in the exact and natural sciences, according to a 2008 report from Swiss Statistics. This drops to 34 percent of engineering students. As women move up through the education system, their representation drops: 58 percent of young women get a high school diploma (maturité); only 38 percent of women get a doctorate. Teaching staff is overwhelmingly male in Swiss universities: only 14.6 percent of university professors are women. This is known as the “leaky pipeline”, in a 2006 report on Swiss women in science in comparison to the EU (in German).

Details and contact:

• Saturday 14 November, International School Geneva, La Grande Boissière campus, 62 rte du Chêne, Geneva. Registration online or on the spot at 08:15
• Contact: Jennifer Kealy, jkealy@cascadeclinical.com, or +33 6 7971 0261

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