Seeing a System that Needs to Change
Riya’s story
While reflecting on a personal experience is a great way to find problems worth solving, other problems start by looking at a system that is deeply flawed. “Systemic” problems are those that persist despite the best actions and intentions of the people in the system. These are inequalities perpetuated by generations of policy and stereotypes. Riya’s story illustrates what it’s like to recognize a systemic problem and start to find solutions.
“Not getting the same exposure to computer science and technology”
“When boys are younger, their toys and everything are about engineering, they’re centered around that. When girls are younger, they aren’t getting the same exposure to computer science and technology that boys are. So I wanted to help change the eighth grade Exploratory curriculum to make it more inclusive to girls, more engaging, and more applicable to the real world.”
In 2016, Riya noticed she was one of three girls in her computer science program at her high school. As she reflected on her own experience, she noticed how girls were discouraged from joining science programs, and advanced classes, all of which lead to massive gender gaps in high school classes. If these gaps exist in high school, they exist even more in higher education, and in the technology workforce in general, with over 75% of the STEM workforce being men.
Riya noticed that the coding curriculum was not applicable to the real world, and students weren’t able to see the results from their work. She worked to change this, and make the curriculum more engaging for young women.
“By switching over to HTML and CSS, and letting students have access to their websites and can see what their code is doing. After that, I was able to focus more on the girls in the STEM aspect. I started a club and planned an event around getting more girls in STEM. We were able to have a day camp for elementary school girls at our school. We brought them in and they did fun STEM activities. Our main thing was giving them exposure and making it fun.
For example, one of the stations at the day camp was different designs to get them exposed to biotech or have them make necklaces that spell their names from binary. So they’re exposed to the basics of computer science. We weren’t having them sit down and code. We just wanted to make it a fun day and know they had those options for the future.
“Things are easier in theory”
“Ideating was kind of hard just because I knew the impact I wanted to have and what I wanted my end product to be, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. Things are kind of easier in theory than when you’re actually practicing them and trying to have results.
Remembering why I was doing it and the end goal and like what I wanted to have done helped. This was something I was passionate about and how it wouldn’t be fair for me to give up. I had to do my all to help the problem. Thinking of that really helped me keep going.”
“The curriculum is better now”
“In my case, my end product wasn’t really tangible. It was getting to see everyone’s opinions and seeing how the kids were reacting and how they felt. So it did feel good to hear that like more girls were wanting to enroll in these classes.
I like the day camp idea. I thought that was really cool. Getting to see the girls and also talk to their parents and like see how their parents felt about it was really cool.”
While Riya’s Dual School project continued, and had a significant impact, she also took advantage of the mentorship, and support that Dual School provides.
“My mentor was able to give me an internship the summer after [Dual School]. She worked with a nonprofit called Coded By Kids, based in Philadelphia. Their mission is to get like equal tech education to inner city schools that might not have that kind of access.
That’s something that Dual School really helped me with, providing me with important people that like can give you a lot of opportunities. I think that was really big.
As an intern, I was working on outreach, activities to get more students engaged in computer science that may not have been before.
Riya is attending the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in computer science. She is now a member of WiCS (for Women in CS) and she hopes to pursue interdisciplinary applications of CS to find other creative ways to make impacts in her community.
Conclusion and Activity
Riya set out to solve what we would call a systemic problem, “a problem due to issues inherent in the overall system, rather than due to a specific, individual, isolated factor.” A series of compounding factors all contribute to the reasons why we see so few women in STEM fields. At Dual School, we map out the different factors using a tree diagram.
For this section, choose a system that you interact with that you believe is unfair. Then, map out the root causes and symptoms of that problem. Asking “why” and digging deeper can help you break down a huge problem into something more focused and manageable.
