Middle school girls from several Beaumont schools got a chance to learn about joining the engineering field on Thursday morning at Lamar University.
Employees from ExxonMobil volunteered their time today to welcome more than 80 middle school girls from five Beaumont Independent School District campuses.
The aim of the "Introduce a Girl to Engineering" event is to inspire more girls to consider pursuing a career in engineering.
Even though there's been an increase in females going into many traditionally male dominated careers like law and medicine women are still "grossly under-represented in engineering" according to EngineerGirl.org.
"I think we have a ways to go to get a number of females that should be in engineering into the field," said ExxonMobil project engineer Taylor Hines.
She says more representation is needed in the field.
Women account for only about 13% of practicing engineers across industry according to a news release from ExxonMobil.
More than 16,000 students across the U.S. have participated in ExxonMobil’s Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day events since the program’s inception in 2003 the release said.
"So we have lots of engineers here today and hopefully these girls can see themselves in these engineers and they can aspire to be something, just because they can see it," Hines told 12News on Thursday.
Organizers hoped to the middle schooler's minds by showing the fun side of engineering by having the girls do hands on experiments like building spaghetti towers and catapults.
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