Edinburgh students launch women in STEM society
175 minutes for chemistry
Three students at the University of Edinburgh have set up a new student society that aims to support the career progression of women studying STEM subjects.
In early October 2016, Elisabeth Feldstein, Briana Norris and Rheanna Filmer, third year chemistry students at the University of Edinburgh, started their own society called Edinburgh University Women in STEM, to address their concerns about the lack of diversity within STEM disciplines. The student union passed the society as an official society later that month.
Founder and president of the society Elisabeth Feldstein explains that the inspiration for its establishment came from her own experience at university: “In my 3 years studying chemistry at Edinburgh we have only had 4 female lecturers. As we are almost reaching the end of our undergraduate careers it has become more clear how STEM fields can be male dominated.”
The three students carried out research to see if there was a similar pre-existing society at the University of Edinburgh. “It was shocking to see that nothing similar already existed,” says Elisabeth. “Through our research we have seen many women in STEM societies at universities such as Oxford and Bristol, and believed it was time to spread the message of confidence and inspiration to young ‘steminists’ at Edinburgh”.
The society was created with the goal of inspiring female STEM students through real life examples. Their mission is to share stories of successful women while empowering women to break gender roles in STEM subjects. Elisabeth explains: “we aim to produce networks of powerful women supporting one another, which in turn will lead to more opportunities for all students. We believe a big part of the large dropout rate for women in STEM careers later on is due to the lack of confidence women possess, and this is something we aim to change.”
Edinburgh University Women in STEM (EUWISTEM) had their first launch event on 6 December last year, where the society gained its first crop of members. There was a brief introduction to the society, an introduction to Interconnect – a cross-Scotland women in STEM network supported by Equate Scotland that EUWISTEM is part of – as well as a comedic introduction on “how to network”. The society plan to use 2017 as an introduction year and their goal is to continue gaining members while increasing their campus awareness. “We are all very excited to see the difference we can make with such a powerful society” says Elisabeth, “we believe it has a lot of potential to help many young women just like ourselves.”
Further information
Find out more about EUWISTEM events on their Facebook and Twitter pages.
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