Girls in STEM: investigating the reasons that too few female students enter technical fields

The purpose of this panel is to provide a forum for educators to present their concerns about the uneven representation of female students in the technical fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The goal of the panel is to further the discussion that began at the Symposium on Education in SIGGRAPH Asia in 2016. The number of female students, worldwide that choose to enroll in technical fields is considerably smaller than the number of male students. In this panel we present potential explanations for this phenomenon and propose ways to improve the situation in the future. STEM graduates become future professionals in all areas of Computer Graphics and related technical fields including Computer Vision, Machine Learning and others. Increasing the number of female students pursuing degrees with a focus on STEM areas will also increase the numbers of female professionals pursuing jobs in Computer Graphics.