When Aparna Sai Nimmagadda looks around the discussion section in her Operating Systems course, the 21-year-old computer science senior sees only five women among her 30 classmates. At UF, that’s a common experience for women in the STEM field.
Women made up about 30% of College of Engineering graduates in the 2023-2024 academic year, according to the most recent data from UF Institutional Planning and Research. In comparison, 57% of total degree recipients across the university that year were women.
The gender gap can lead to women “not feeling at home” in their major, Nimmagadda said.
That’s why she’s part of Girls Who Code, one of the many campus organizations geared toward promoting community and career development for women in STEM fields at UF.
Nimmagadda joined Girls Who Code as a business major in her sophomore year and soon switched to computer science as her interest in the field grew. Being in the club allowed her to be part of a supportive engineering community of women before joining the major.
“I had already organically made those relationships, so asking for help was very easy, whether that was choosing my classes or also the assignments themselves as well,” Nimmagadda said.
Nimmagadda, now president of Girls Who Code, said the group and others like it can help make women studying STEM fields at UF feel more at home in their careers by creating a space where women in engineering can meet each other outside of the male-dominated classrooms and formal networking events.
“I think Girls Who Code focuses on bridging that gap through giving space to students on campus to make those relationships, because a lot of relationships aren’t made in the classroom. They’re made outside of it,” Nimmagadda said.
UF’s Society of Women Engineers
The gender gap isn’t unique to computer science. In the 2023-2024 academic year, about 17% of mechanical engineering degree recipients were women.
UF’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers aims to address this imbalance through outreach and mentoring programs. The group focuses on educating young girls about engineering from an early age, hoping to shift the gender gap over time.
Lili Lusvardi, one of the chapter’s social chairs, said exposing young women and elementary school-level students to engineering can help reduce the gender gap in the field.
“I think that’s going to take years to accomplish and I think for the time being it's nice to congregate as engineers who are women,” said Lusvardi, a 20-year-old computer engineering sophomore.
Lusvardi said UF SWE created a tutorial for elementary-level girls to learn scratch coding language. Scratch is a block coding language used to teach children coding, which SWE used during one of its outreach events.
By 2023, 16.7% of individuals working in engineering and architecture were women, compared to the 9% of women in these fields in the 1990s, according to the Society of Women Engineers website. Female representation in these fields varied, with women making up 26.9% of those working in computer and mathematical occupations and 55% of those in biological sciences. SWE also establishes mentors and events for women in engineering to aid the process of finding jobs after graduation, said treasurer Zoe Szczesniak, a 19-year-old mechanical engineering sophomore. The annual SWE conference also puts women in contact with engineering companies that are looking specifically for women.
According to Szczesniak, multiple members of SWE UF have received job and internship offers due to the annual job fair -– most recently, two internships at Honeywell and one prize from Capital One.
“It’s bigger than UF’s career fair and specifically targeted towards women in engineering,” Szczesniak said. “You know the people there are looking for someone in your demographic regardless.”
WiNGHacks
Annual events like WiNGHacks also build community for women and nonbinary students interested in computer science and engineering. The event is a yearly hackathon with an emphasis on women and nonbinary students, bridging the gap of experience needed to enter fields in computer science and engineering.
The event tasks students with developing a computer software within a two day deadline. At this year’s hackathon in February, the winning team created a software called “Plan Your Care,” which helps people find the nearest abortion clinic and provides them with information about abortion depending on their state.
WiNGHacks co-director Valentina Esteban, a 20-year-old computer science junior, said the difference in the amount of men versus women in her classes is increasingly apparent as she progresses in her degree. Having a space like WiNGHacks provides comfort for women and nonbinary students to be a part of something that is typically male-dominated, she said.
Teji Kari, a 20-year-old computer science junior and the other co-director of WiNGHacks, also feels uneasy with the lack of female peers in her classes.
“It’s tough regardless of gender,” Kari said. “But obviously if you see less people like you, it makes you feel like ‘Oh, maybe it’s because of me.’”
Mya Ramsey, a 20-year-old UF digital arts and sciences junior, said being a member of the tech support team for WiNGHacks allowed her to lend guidance to students participating in the event by making sure their projects ran with little issues. Additionally, to bridge the gap of experience needed for joining the computer science field, she said the event gives women and nonbinary students a chance to celebrate programming in what’s typically a male-dominated environment.
“A lot of women in the space are kind of iffy since it’s very male-dominated. It’s hard to ask for help,” Ramsey said. ”You feel like ‘Do I not know anything? Do I not have a place in this?’”
Members of the tech support team for the annual event gave their insight to students while the hackathon went on as it was built to include first-time hackathon goers.
“Instead of feeling like ‘I don’t know that much,’ it’s like ‘OK, I’m taking this opportunity to learn instead,’” Ramsey said.
Contact Michael Angee at mangee@alligator.org. Follow him on X @michaelangee.
Michael Angee is a second-year journalism major and the Student Government reporter. When he's not at the Gainesville Sun building, he enjoys cooking and listening to music with friends.
