LOS ANGELES — An elementary school in the valley is celebrating its first all-girl robotics team.

The fourth and fifth grade students at Vintage Magnet Elementary School in North Hills are ranked 109 in the world and have two excellence awards, which is the highest award given at the competition.

What You Need To Know

  • An elementary school in the valley is celebrating its first all-girl robotics team

  • Early exposure of girls to STEM fields like engineering and computer science can help increase the amount of women who enter related professions

  • According to U.S. Census data, women are nearly half of the U.S. workforce but only 27% of STEM workers

  • Gender equity experts like Dr. Lindsey Malcolm-Piqueux at Caltech say more needs to be done

Fifth-grader Alexa Diaz said they don’t see many other girls when they compete. She thinks it may be because people think robotics is for boys.

“Some people believe it’s more boys than girls and I was really proud that when we made the robot it was just us, all girls,” Diaz said.

Early exposure of girls to STEM fields such as engineering and computer science can help increase the number of women who enter related professions.

According to U.S. Census data, women are nearly half of the U.S. workforce but only 27% of STEM workers. Gains have been made, as only 8% of women were in STEM fields in 1970.

But gender equity experts like Dr. Lindsey Malcolm-Piqueux said more needs to be done. She is a planetary scientist who studied at both MIT and Caltech and didn’t see many women in her classes.
 
“I was often the only and often times one of a few women of any race, and often the only Black person certainly the only Black woman,” Malcolm-Piqueux said.

Now, as the assistant VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Caltech, she makes the spaces where she studies more actively inclusive of women. Malcolm-Piqueux said she believes getting women to study these fields needs to start early.

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“What we see from a lot of the research is that at very young ages girls, even though they are performing at similar if not higher levels in terms of mathematics and achievements, their self-confidence in succeeding and pursuing these fields goes down,” Malcolm-Piqueux said.

Robotics teams and other activities can help disrupt that feeling, and make girls like fourth-grader Nathalie Mejia more confident.

“Girls can do anything they want, anything they set their mind to,” Mejia said. “And that’s what we’ve been doing.”

The robotics team has qualified for a world robotics competition. They will compete in Texas in May.