Latina girls are the least likely of any group to indicate that they’re interested in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, according to a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities report. While Latina women comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, they make up just two percent of scientists and engineers.
Luckily, engineer Luz Rivas is aiming to change that with her DIY Girls after school program in her home neighborhood of Pacoima in Los Angeles.
Rivas grew up poor in L.A. with her sister and single mother, often sleeping in other people’s garages because they had no permanent home of their own. In fifth grade, Rivas used a computer at school and immediately fell in love. “I felt like I had a real skill. I always liked things that had a real answer,” she told Erica L Sánchez of NBC News. From then on, she took every science class she could and applied to MIT just to see if she could get in. She did. After overcoming initial fears about leaving L.A., she went to MIT, even though “It felt like it was another country,” she told Sánchez. “I had never met so many students who had parents who were college-educated. It was shocking to see kids whose parents were guiding them. I didn’t have that.”
Now Rivas is stepping in to guide other girls who don’t have role models in STEM fields. After grad school and various engineering jobs, Rivas moved back to Los Angeles in 2013 to start DIY Girls. Most of the fifth grade girls in the DIY Girls after school program are Latina and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Rivas teaches them how to use 3D printers, write computer code, make wearable electronics, build toys, and more.
According to its website, DIY Girls aims to provide “a continuous pathway of support to a technical career” for these girls all the way through high school. Rivas works to develop the girls’ confidence, so that they keep raising their hands and asking questions right on through middle school, when many girls clam up due to peer pressure. DIY Girls expanded its program to a second public school this year.
DIY Girls gets moms involved too, with meetups for women who want to learn technical skills including coding, woodworking, and electronics. Rivas said that many of the girls’ parents work in construction, and become interested in what their daughters are learning. “People in our community are not engineers, but they know how to make things. They know how to make everything,” she told Sánchez. And soon there will be a new generation of women in this neighborhood who can make anything they want to, as well.
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Tag: Hispanics
The Surprisingly Easy Way to Make People More Tolerant
No longer do Latino immigrants remain living in border states and other places where there are long-established Hispanic communities. But while they are successful in finding jobs in the Midwest and the South, they encounter another problem when arriving in these geographic areas: housing segregation.
According to one study, this segregation happens particularly within suburban and rural areas. And another study suggests that hate crimes against Hispanics rise whenever there is an increase in Hispanic immigration. Most of these crimes are reported in places where Latinos are new to the area, as there are few hate crimes in long-established Hispanic communities. The Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Latinos who think discrimination against Hispanics is a major problem in America is increasing, with 61 percent of Latinos saying so in 2010, compared to 47 percent in 2002.
Ryan D. Enos of Harvard University set out to find out why some Americans have negative biases against Latinos. He identified nine commuter rail stations in the Boston area used almost exclusively by white passengers. Then he randomly selected a few of the stations to receive an intervention — two Latino people talking to each other in Spanish while waiting on the platform for the train for two weeks. After that, he surveyed people at each of the stations about their attitudes toward immigration. His findings? He discovered that those who had stood near the Spanish-speaking passengers demonstrated increasingly negative attitudes toward immigration — despite the fact that the Spanish speakers were not aggressive and did not act in an abnormal fashion.
But, he also found that the longer white people were exposed to the Spanish speakers, the less “exclusionary” their attitudes became. When he surveyed people after just three days of exposure to the Spanish speakers, he found them to be much more exclusionary than when he interviewed people after spending ten days near the Spanish speakers on the platform.
Enos’s findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mirror those of a recent Oxford study published in the same journal that found people with racist attitudes become less so when they simply see people of another race in their neighborhood over an extended period of time. Those with exclusionary attitudes don’t even need to interact with those of another race. To become more tolerant, all they need is to go about their daily business in close proximity with those of different ethnicities. Professor Miles Hewstone, the director of the Oxford Centre for the Study of Intergroup Conflict told Sarah Knapton of The Telegraph, “If two white people with identical views went to live in different postcodes for a year, the person in the neighborhood with more mixing between ethnic groups would likely leave more tolerant.”
Racism and discrimination against Latinos hasn’t ended yet in America, but by 2043, when the U.S. Census has projected that whites will no longer be in the majority in America, it could ebb, just by virtue of increasingly mixed neighborhoods.
MORE: Latino Families Were Hit Hard by the Recession. Here’s How They’re Fighting Back.
Latinos Were Hard Hit by the Recession. Here’s How They’re Fighting Back
The recent recession hit American Latino families especially hard—the Pew Research Center found the median household wealth of Latino families fell more than that of any other group, decreasing 66% between 2005 and 2009, from $18,359 to $6,325. Compounding those losses was a hard hit to industries employing many Latinos, such as construction, hospitality, and domestic services. It left the unemployment rate among Latinos 2% higher than it is for everyone else. Many Latino families are still struggling to regain what they’ve lost.
So the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals is teaming up with Latino business leaders, led by former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros, to start the Hispanic Wealth Project. They will begin by studying the problem, and then by the end of this year develop a plan they hope will help Latino families close the gap and triple their household wealth in ten years.
One major focus will be home ownership. A larger percentage of Latinos with mortgages lost their homes due to foreclosure between 2004 and 2008 than did any other group. In a statement to Griselda Navarez of Voxxi, Gary Acosta, CEO of NAHREP, said the project leaders plan to address “a broad set of factors, like small business growth, savings, education, income, jobs and financial literacy.”
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The Bay Area’s New Boom Will Change the Face of Silicon Valley
Like many families across America, the Youngs had holiday traditions. On Christmas Eve, they ate gumbo at Grandma’s house. On Christmas Day, they opened gifts near the tree. And on the morning after Christmas, they relaxed. That is, until 2001, when Jason Young, then a college sophomore, learned that he had just spent his last holiday in his family’s Inglewood, Calif., home. On that Dec. 26, the Youngs’ house, already in foreclosure, was taken from them for good. “It’s a surreal experience to have someone knock on your door and ask you to leave immediately,” he says. “We’d always struggled with money, but I had no idea we were going to be evicted.”
The eviction may have ruined a favorite holiday for Young, but it taught him an important lesson about fiscal responsibility—one that has informed his career since. After his family lost their home, Young learned that his single mother had accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt in an attempt to save her home; she eventually filed for bankruptcy. “It became clear to me that the math didn’t add up,” he says. “I’d always been conscientious of money, but the experience made me want to make even better financial decisions. I never wanted to be in that situation again.”
And he didn’t want other low-income kids to find themselves in that situation either, which was one of the reasons he founded Mindblown Labs in 2011. The Oakland, Calif.-based company creates mobile, educational games geared to improving financial literacy among underserved youth.
The games were an instant success. But as Young taught students how to manage their money, he also recognized a need to help them learn how to make that money in the first place. This prompted him to co-found The Hidden Genius Project, a two-year training program designed to teach young black men science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills through lectures and project-based workshops. Continue reading “The Bay Area’s New Boom Will Change the Face of Silicon Valley”