Access Is Not Enough: On STEM, Girls, and Belonging

The framing around girls and STEM has shifted over the past decade — from “girls can’t do STEM” to “girls need access to STEM.” That shift matters. But access, on its own, is not enough.

In my work with youth-facing STEM programming in New York City, I have seen programs that do everything right on the access side — free, community-based, culturally competent recruitment — and still lose girls by week three. Not because the content is too hard. Because the environment does not feel like a place they belong.

What belonging requires

Belonging in a learning environment is not a feeling that arrives automatically when the door is open. It is built through specific, repeated experiences: being called on and heard, seeing your ways of thinking reflected in the work, having mentors who look like you and have been where you are, making things that matter to your community.

When these conditions are present, participation tends to take care of itself. When they are absent, access becomes a revolving door.

The curriculum question

This is where curriculum design intersects with equity work in a way I find generative. A STEM curriculum that treats “rigor” as synonymous with abstraction — that values formal proof over contextual reasoning, individual performance over collaborative sense-making — systematically disadvantages students who have been taught that their ways of knowing are not academic.

Redesigning for belonging is not about lowering standards. It is about asking what standards we have chosen, and why, and whether they are measuring what we care about.

That is the question I bring into every program design process. It does not have a clean answer. But I think it is the right place to start.