Identified Trends and Suggested Avenues to Reverse Trends

Historically, women have been underrepresented in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields both as college majors and in the professional community. This disturbing trend, observed in many countries, is more serious and evident in American universities and is reflected in the U.S. workforce statistics. In this article, we examine historical students ’ interest data in order to further the understanding of this discrepancy and to suggest methods to reverse this trend. Thirty years of historical ACT data were analyzed by expressed interest patterns, ACT scores, gender, and intended college major or career aspiration. Statistical package for the social sciences software was used to analyze the data and examine the historical trends of students ’ expressed interest in STEM-related careers. Results show that there is a significant (although expected) discrepancy between the number of male and female students who expressed interest in engineering majors and careers. Significant changes have also been observed in the interest in engineering fields over time, most likely because of societal influences. These influences are most profound in computer-related fields, caus-ing speculation that both males and females were influenced by the dot com era but that only male interest was piqued due to the rise of computer gaming in the late 1990s. Students are furthe