Three Naperville high school seniors, including Sabina Maddila, founded GEMS to encourage girls in STEM. Their inaugural conference at Illinois Institute of Technology drew over 60 high school girls and 20 women professionals who offered mentoring and career advice.
Hello everyone, I'm Dolly McCarthy. Thanks for joining us. 3 Naperville teens are paving the way for girls to shine in jobs where men traditionally outnumber women. The Labor Department says women make up fewer than a quarter of all professionals in science, technology, engineering, and engineering and mathematical fields. Hoping to change that, our 3 local high school seniors, Naperville Central's Sabina Maddila and her friends from Naperville North, Jaya and Mehta Parulakar, started GEMS, which stands for Girls Engineers, Mathematicians and Scientists. GEMS recently had its first conference at the Illinois Institute of Technology on the Wheaton campus. That event attracted more than 60 high school girls.
Hopefully the girls, when they walk out of here, they will have a list of people that they can talk to, they can ask questions about whatever about their fields, what they want to be. That's what the goal is, to have that mentoring relationship between the speakers and the people who attend.
The girls have been planning the group's inaugural event since April. Some 20 women in engineering and science professions offered their advice at the conference.
