It’s no secret that many career fields are heavily gender slanted.  Teaching has perhaps one of the most intense gender slants.  Approximately 80 percent of teachers are females, and increasingly so females are entering the career field.  However it seems that females are heavily underrepresented in fields such as engineering.  Only 14 percent of the engineering field is made up by women.

Cathy Chirco, math teacher, is experiencing both of these extremes in her new position.  As of the 2014-2015 school year, she began teaching Intro to engineering design (IED) along with her other math classes.  Chirco is the second female to ever teach an IED class and is the first female to teach the course at MHS.

Chirco said her time in the engineering department has been great so far.  She has enjoyed the students and the other staff members that she works with.

“It has been going very well so far,” Chirco said, “It’s lots of fun and It’s a nice break from the math classroom I’ve been in.”

As far as the numbers at MHS go, in relation to the number of female vs male students in engineering classes, Chirco said the female to male ratio is pretty balanced. “There are already a fair number of female students taking my classes and we want to encourage any student to take the class we like to have a large number of students signing up for the courses because they are excellent classes and with that it would be great if there were more females who continued to sign up for the classes,” Chirco said.

Even though the numbers in the engineering department seem pretty balanced at MHS, Chirco agreed there was an unarguable slant in certain career fields that are pertaining to gender.  However, Chirco believes that the female percentage in the engineering field will continue to grow over time.

“I think over the last 10-15 years there has already been an increase of the number of females in stem related fields, and I think that it’s definitely going to continue to grow because I think that female students are becoming more and more comfortable with the idea of taking a stem class and more comfortable with themselves being in a stem related field like engineering so I think that’s going to continue to grow,” Chirco said.

Chirco said she has enjoyed working with the engineering staff and said the whole department has been very encouraging of female students joining and herself joining the department as a teacher.

Jim Kremer, department chairmen for industrial technology, said that having Chirco in his department has gone very well so far and he hopes that her presence will have a positive effect on students especially females because they are underrepresented in engineering.

“It’s a national problem in highschools and in universities women just don’t seem to go into the engineering type of field,” Kremer said.

Despite the fact that women are minorities in this field Kremer said that going into engineering is a favorable thing for females to do.

“Colleges are actively recruiting females, I think girls are somewhat raised to not want to take science and math.  For some reason they think they’re not as good at it when in fact we know that’s not true.