Matilda to STEM?

Someone shared with us anonymously:

I am from India, 16 years old. I want to talk about specific sexism in STEM majors around the world. I’m currently studying engineering and my teachers just assume girls are naturally not good at math and science and their brains can’t work that way. Once during a lecture, our sir was teaching a particular topic and specifically said “girls pay more attention here because topics like this where you have to visualize more you lack the means to do so”. He was a very good teacher and very smart himself. Imagine hearing a teacher like that say those words. For someone like me who loves science, I was in a dilemma for a long time whether I should continue because apparently, girls can’t do it. I was agitated for a while and talked to a friend about it who was a girl and she literally said girls aren’t suited for this normally because in history there haven’t been many women scientists either. She loved math but is majoring in law because she thought math isn’t for girls and no matter how hard she’ll try she can’t do it. I realized how stupid all of this is and I wish more women would go for STEM majors. Boys in my class don’t acknowledge girls either even though the topper of my class is a girl and better than most of them. I tried talking about it on Quora and YouTube comments and over 50 guys have told me history has made it clear that women are not as intelligent as men.

If you think about it, not just men but women believe this too and that’s the REASON EVEN NOW there are so few women in science. My teachers don’t take me seriously and my computer teacher being a woman is extremely sexist as whenever it comes to competitions she only asks boys to participate even tho the topper of my computer class is again the same girl. Please, I want someone with a platform to acknowledge this problem. It might look minor but being in that field kills me. People assume girls are just pretty little things with no brain and I want to prove that wrong. 

There’s a term called the Matilda effect which means the women from the past are either forgotten or their achievements were overwritten by males. No one knows about this. When it comes to STEM majors everyone knows just Marie Curie when there are thousands more, in the past. Nuclear fission was discovered by a woman but the Nobel went to the male colleague. There are many more of such instances. This is not my sexual harassment story but please understand when you’re talents and future is judged by your gender it’s a different level of sexism.