STEMforGIRLS Club is designed to keep girls interested and engaged in STEM while in junior high and high school, with the goal of increasing their enrollment in STEM post-secondary programs, and eventually to employment in STEM careers.

Maintaining girls’ engagement in STEM will lead to benefits for everyone working in these fields. Increasing diversity in the workplace has been shown to improve creativity and innovation, which creates a competitive advantage for businesses.  

Increasing the number of women working in STEM careers will enhance the economic wellbeing of those women, their families, and their communities.

Through the online resources and virtual offerings, we have unlimited possibilities for engagement with girls, community leaders and teachers.

And with members graduating into volunteer roles of Junior Leader, member engagement will be accumulative year after year.

Formal feedback methods and external evaluations indicate that our past programs have been highly successful inspiring girls to consider STEM and skilled trades training and employment. Participants have reported increased interest in STEM fields, increased awareness of career opportunities, and increased confidence and self-esteem to pursue them.

In fact, a summative evaluation of previous programming conducted by Hollett and Sons Inc. revealed that “participants in WRDC’s programs are far more likely than the general female population in the province to pursue a career where females are underrepresented” (2013).

Gender-aware career exploration works and WRDC and STEMforGIRLS are committed to the delivery of responsive, research-based programming to meet our goal of creating a critical mass of gender-diverse workers in STEM and the Skilled Trades.

Evaluations of our current programs have revealed:  

WRDC’s Research and Evaluation Team regularly employ a variety of evaluation tools to monitor and evaluate STEMforGIRLS Club programming, including, but not limited to, exit surveys, key informant interviews and focus groups.

These evaluations ensure that we are delivering effective, high-quality programming that meets intended objectives and outcomes.

We are currently assessing the long-term impact of individual participation in STEMforGIRLS through the collection of new data on past participants.

The Possibilities for the STEMforGIRLS Club

While the program is still too new to have extensive feedback available, we recognize that the online resources and our virtual offerings available through the STEMforGIRLS Club provides unlimited possibilities for engagement with participants, role models, community leaders, and teachers.  We anticipate that the ongoing engagement and continuity of support provided by the digital clubhouse will increase our impact exponentially.