Area test results show how a stubborn gender gap in math, science scores has widened again

When Kylie Perez joined the South Eugene Robotics Team in 2023, she was one of only a few girls.

She remembers meeting two others on her first day: Zoey, the electrical team lead, and Charlotte, Zoey’s friend. Perez immediately felt more comfortable on the team with Zoey and Charlotte around. They taught her to speak up when the boys ignored her or she was overlooked during competitions.

“I was really shy in my sophomore year,” Perez said. “So they also taught me kind of like, ‘Oh, it’s not all in my head.’ And also I can say stuff.”

Ten years ago, about 30% of the high school robotics team was female and about half of the team leaders were girls. Then the pandemic hit.

The robotics team — which goes by the acronym SERT and accepts students from all local high schools — didn’t meet for a year and half because of COVID, and in fall of 2021 they reconvened as a small, mostly male team. This was followed up by a mostly male team the following year, and adults who supervised the team quickly realized how fortunate they had been before the pandemic to have as many girls as they did.

While girls’ participation on the team is now growing again — due to intentional recruiting by parents, mentors and fellow students — the group’s dip in female involvement after the pandemic mirrors a worrying trend in K-12 state test scores. 

Girls are again scoring lower on state science and math tests than boys, a gap that was significantly narrower before COVID. Local districts, however, are focused on raising test scores for all students after the pandemic slump. That leaves many of the efforts to get girls excited about STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — to students themselves.

The STEM gender gap

Before the pandemic, the gap was essentially closed. 

In the Bethel, Eugene 4J and Springfield school districts, the gap between boys’ and girls’ proficiency in math was within one percentage point for the 2017-18 academic year. Where a gap existed, it was actually due to girls testing higher than boys. In that same academic year, Bethel girls performed nearly 10% higher than boys in science.

Now, all three districts have widening gaps, following a trend plaguing schools across the nation. 

Brandy Todd, a former University of Oregon researcher, studied gender disparities in STEM achievement while she worked at UO. In 2008 Todd started Science Program to Inspire Creativity and Excellence, or SPICE, a summer camp program providing middle school girls with hands-on science experience.  

Amid recent UO layoffs, however, Todd lost her position. The SPICE program now has to find a new home outside the university. 

Todd saw firsthand how girls’ achievement suffered after the pandemic. 

“That disconnect that happened with COVID really set girls back, because now they don’t have these opportunities, they’re just sitting at home behind the screen,” Todd said. “It’s been five years, but that just lingers with them. These kiddos who had to be locked up at home have suffered. They need that human interaction.”

On the South Eugene Robotics Team, mentor Paul Dassonville said the group struggled to recruit girls after the pandemic because they weren’t seeing themselves represented on the team. 

Perez, now a senior at Sheldon High School, wrote her International Baccalaureate extended essay on barriers to girls entering STEM fields.

She found through her research that, because of conscious and unconscious societal stereotypes and expectations about who goes into STEM fields, girls don’t think they belong in STEM-focused spaces, like robotics teams. This also leads to a lack of confidence in math and science classes.

If a girl does decide to pursue a STEM-related activity, there are other barriers to her staying. She may feel like she has to overperform to prove her intelligence and ability, Perez said. Perez herself has experienced this — even in high school. 

Efforts to rebuild

Dassonville, who is a professor of neuroscience at UO, has approached SERT’s struggle to recruit girls scientifically. He considered the average differences between the male and female brains, which, as he likes to remind his students, do not apply universally, but do exist.

“More often, boys are interested in just building cool things,” Dassonville said. “And girls are interested, more often, in building cool things, but building cool things that help people and have that added component to it.”

SERT students lead a summer camp for middle schoolers that teaches electrical, mechanical engineering and programming skills. In the camp, kids modify drivable, battery-powered jeeps to make them more accessible for kids with motor impairments.

But while the community service aspect of the camp seemed like a good way to draw more girls, a female co-captain saw the need for some tweaking. The team decided to create a separate camp option in 2022 for female and gender-nonconforming middle schoolers to increase their participation.

“They could be in an environment where they weren’t having to compete with the maybe higher level of energy and distraction that the boys are prone to,” Dassonville said.

Out of the female and gender-nonconforming SERT camp came a new middle school robotics team, called Digital Dragons. The group of students who started it were a particularly tight group of girls from the camp. Freshman Kaia Urbancic was one of these girls.

Urbancic is passionate about making a space for girls in robotics. Digital Dragons aims to keep their gender ratio at half male, half female and gender-nonconforming. It received a grant from Google to fund its efforts to recruit other girls. Kaia Urbancic’s mom, Maile, who helped Kaia start Digital Dragons, said parents of boys seek out STEM extracurriculars much more often than parents of girls, making recruitment more challenging. 

This year, Kaia Urbancic and some of her friends from Digital Dragons started high school and transitioned to the SERT team. Maile Urbancic said she’s been proud to see how confident and comfortable the girls are, even on some of the hardest sub-teams, like the software team. As a mom, mentor and woman with a math and science background, she’s observed that confidence is a big barrier to girls’ participation in robotics.

“(The boys) are pretty sure they can do everything and the girls — very much not,” Maile Urbancic said.

According to Todd, the UO researcher, middle school is an important time for identity formation. This makes it a critical period to instill a love for math and science.

“You ask a third grader what they want to be, and they’ll say they want to be an astronaut, prince, princess, president, and they see absolutely no conflict in all of those things. They really do have this notion of, ‘I can be and do anything,’” Todd said. “In middle school, kids start to realize that they have to make choices.”

It’s in this key period of identity formation, according to Todd, that girls are driven away from STEM fields.

“A lot of girls look at science and actually like it,” Todd said. “But at the same time, it’s like, ‘Am I going to be perceived as not the right kind of girl if I’m interested in these things?’ It’s really easy and logical for a lot of girls to just look at that science box and check no.”

Through Digital Dragons, Maile Urbancic hopes to continue shepherding girls onto the SERT team to regenerate the female presence that was normalized on the team before the pandemic.

Girls add emotional maturity, organization and communication skills that boys sometimes lack, Maile said. Having more girls on the team also gets boys who want to go into STEM fields used to working with girls — and having them as leaders.

District efforts to bolster STEM scores

While extracurriculars can be motivators and confidence boosters for student success in STEM, what happens in classrooms is also critical.

Bethel School District has a Women in Engineering class at Willamette High School to give girls an affinity space to gain hands-on engineering skills. Alisha Dodds, Bethel’s community relations and communications director, said teachers also intentionally recruit and support girls in upper level science classes who show interest or aptitude. Dodds also touted the district’s new Career and Technology Education building at Willamette.

“Programs were intentionally placed to promote cross collaboration, so that students who took part in a graphic design class could directly work with students next door in the photography class,” Dodds said. “Same sort of thing with digital design and computer science. Shared spaces help students see how creativity and technology blend, increasing STEM visibility and interest among girls.”

4J is implementing a new math curriculum this year that administrators hope will address the gender gap in math and science. The curriculum aims to promote “inclusive and equitable math classrooms.”

“While we’re only a few months into math implementation, we are hearing from both teachers and students that, while the learning is challenging, students are engaged in math in ways they haven’t been in the past,” said Erin Gaston, 4J’s elementary curriculum and multi-tiered system of support administrator.

Springfield Public Schools is in its second year of using a new science curriculum in middle schools, which is also designed to be more accessible to a wide variety of learners.

“We’re encouraged by improvements in overall student performance, including recent 11th-grade assessment results that are now approaching the state average,” said Brian Richardson, the district’s director of communications and community engagement. “We are also prioritizing focused improvement among key student subgroups, both by ethnicity and by gender, as part of our ongoing commitment to equitable outcomes and access.”

Girls inspiring girls

Last year, 15% of SERT team members at competitions were girls. So far this year, about 25% of members are girls.

Perez is now co-captain of SERT, and has made it her mission to get more girls involved in robotics and STEM in general. Last year, she started a Women in STEM club at Sheldon with her friend Keira, using snacks, social events and relationship-building to recruit girls.

“I’m crazy about it,” Perez said. “The two things that really get me yapping are probably Women in STEM and aerospace engineering.”

Their collective excitement has been infectious. The Sheldon Women in STEM Instagram page inspired Churchill and South Eugene High School to also start Women in STEM clubs. North Eugene students had already started one. 

Perez credits the mentorship of the older female students in SERT for the belonging she felt on the team, and for planting the seed of confidence that Perez needed to lead.

She’s excited to see the freshmen girls who just joined the team from Digital Dragons make their mark and be the next leaders.