Womengineered exists to serve as STEMpowerment, by offering representation and celebration of strong role models in STEM of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Along with features of strong women role models, Womengineered posts about exciting new technologies and provides coverage of scientific advances.
Created by Hunter Richards during her senior spring at Harvard University as a way to showcase her projects and thesis for family and friends, she soon started to include much more of the women who inspired her. Reflective of all the amazing role models and sources of support she had received, Hunter’s passion for engineering wouldn’t have been possible without all of the encouragement from mentors, friends, and family. After taking a course titled “Gender and Science” her freshman year at Harvard, Hunter started to contextualize her own experiences and feel more empowered to help others like herself within STEM.
Hunter hopes to continue exploring interventions to help introduce people to STEM and make it an exciting, inclusive space by celebrating figures in tech, both past and present, and discuss topics and innovation that she is interested in. As an Environment Engineer, she is always excited for #SustainabilitySaturdays to share her tips, facts, and quotes that she’s collected over the years.
As someone who struggled to feel comfortable in STEM spaces, Hunter is passionate about helping others and making the environment more welcoming. With this project, Hunter felt more confident in herself as an engineer and was able to overcome the years of being called “mouthy,” along with an array of pet names, by men in STEM fields, professors repeatedly asking her and other female classmates if they were able to keep up with the rest of the class while they explained a lab or topic, and male classmates who didn’t want to work with the girls on problem sets or would interrupt girls in class to repeat the same though, except louder, and were given credit for it. Instead of being angry, Hunter is motivated to make sure that others won’t have to feel alone or unheard, as she often did when she started out in engineering.
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