A Journey Towards Feminism Anonymous

Picture the scene. I, a young high school girl, walk into a reputable college's biomathematics laboratory. I have high hopes of finding several successful women walking around the lab, women I would be able to call my mentors for the summer. After all, I was a part of a summer program that motivated young girls to join the STEM fields. However, how is this for irony? I find myself standing in a lab of twelve people: only three are women. My mentors, two male doctoral students. And so I stand there wondering. Why am I in a girl's STEM program and given two male mentors? Why are there three women? Why is this even acceptable? I then recalled the statistics behind women's wage gaps. When one thinks about the gender given more promotion and encouragement, one does not think about women. When one thinks about scientists, the pronoun used becomes "he". I then realized that society had failed to understand feminism. If feminism is essential, honest equality of both genders, why is it that society cannot accept it as such?

I clearly saw gender inequality in the workplace during the summer programs I entered at NYU and Girls Who Code. When I asked, at NYU, why the ratio of men to women was disproportional, a lab member replied that the...