Annaliese Cunniffe ’19, president of the Lehigh University section of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), spoke at a press conference marking Women’s Equal Pay Day on April 2.
The event, hosted by the Bethlehem YMCA at the Bethlehem Area Public Library, brought together leaders from numerous Lehigh Valley organizations to call attention to the gender wage gap and shed light on efforts to address the issue from a broad range of perspectives.
Cunniffe, a mechanical engineer, discussed inequality through the lens of STEM-related fields, citing statistics showing that although 74 percent of girls express an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math in middle school, less than 7 percent go on to graduate with a STEM degree.
“This extreme drop in interest is most often attributed to societal gender roles, a lack of STEM role models, and parental discouragement,” she said.
Cunniffe said that not all STEM majors are created equal and pointed to discrepancies in starting salaries.
“Of the 15 STEM disciplines with the most female-male equality, the average starting salary is approximately $40,000,” she said. “In contrast, of the 15 disciplines with the most female-male inequality—10 out of 15 being engineering disciplines such as petroleum and mechanical engineering—the average early-career salary is nearly $20,000 greater. These findings suggest that even when inspiring young girls into the STEM field, we are still pointing them toward less-valued disciplines.”
As a way to help address these issues, she said, collegiate and professional SWE members lead engineering workshops and mentor local female K-12 students, educating girls on the variety of STEM-related career opportunities.
One of those programs took place in March on Lehigh’s Mountaintop Campus. More than 60 girls from local middle schools attended the university’s annual one-day spring CHOICES event, where SWE members lead a variety of activities, including water filtration experiments and robot coding, to teach the students about multiple engineering disciplines and foster an interest in the future pursuit of STEM fields.
The CHOICES program, which also offers two week-long summer day camps, is sponsored by the Rossin College along with the Lehigh chapter of SWE, and is supported by partner organizations such as Bosch Rexroth, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Air Products and Chemicals, and Boeing.
