As I walked into my math professor's office to take a quiz, I became immediately aware of the lack of females in the room. My math professor is female and I noticed another female professor in the offices, but other than that, it was all testosterone. My math professor sent me into the engineering lab to take the quiz, a room full of computers with a whiteboard wall that students are encouraged to use in order to figure out problems.

In the engineering lab, I was surrounded by men. There were no women in the lab except for me, and not only was I aware of this, but the men in the room were aware acutely aware of me being an outsider in the room, perhaps due to the fact that I am an elementary education major and have no place in an engineering lab, or perhaps because I am a woman. When I mentioned this to my friend at Butler, she seemed surprised that I would notice something like this. However, when I mentioned this to my Mom and my friend from high school who also attends Butler, they were not surprised by realization.

I went to an all-girls high school in Shaker Heights, Ohio where students were and are encouraged to dream, dare, and do. At my high school, my teachers and headmistress pushed us to be our best selves. We have a brand new robotics team at the school thanks to the students' perseverance. Our school is filled with future engineers, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, educators, historians, artists, actors, and anything that a student wants to be. Sadly, my high school does not reflect today's society. After all, there are very few women who run Fortune-500 companies and women in the field of science are still an anomaly.

Think about this riddle: a father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” My first guess was that the surgeon was gay and the son has two fathers, which is plausible. However, the surgeon could also be a woman- the son's mother. When I heard the answer to the riddle, I was frustrated and mad. After all, I consider myself a feminist, but I am gender biased. It makes sense, though, considering the society I was raised in.

According to statistics from catalyst.org, "women currently hold 20 (or 4.0%) CEO positions at S&P 500 companies". The Wall Street Journal states that "46% of physicians in training are women", however, "women make up a little more than a third of full-time academic medicine faculty". So what do we do? Sure there are more women in the workplace than there were 100 years ago, but women still have a far way to go. I think the best thing to do from here is to realize that diversity is one of the best things for the workplace and we have to encourage people of all genders to dream to be anything despite the gender norms. This is why I am an education major; I want to encourage my students to be what they want and help them get there, and perhaps that's just a little naïve, but that's alright with me.