that everyone was just as nervous as she was. She plucked up some courage and began talking to a few of the kids around her. The tension eased.

This was Zolfaghari’s first day of Ryerson’s Research Opportunity Program in Engineering (ROPE), a month-long summer program that gives kids the chance to work with engineering graduate students and professors at Ryerson.

Nine years later, Zolfaghari has her undergradaute degree in biomedical engineering and her master’s in electrical and computer engineering, both completed at Ryerson. She works at the university as the engineering enrichment and outreach coordinator.

At Ryerson, women made up 22.2 per cent of the Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science in 2015. In the Faculty of Science, the number is slightly higher, at 39.6 per cent. Gender imbalance in science,important to promote diversity in pretty much any human endeavour.”

When Lexi Benson was seven years old, she remembers watching her father work on the circuit breaker while he was refinishing the basement.

She looked around the room, wondering how it was made and why the lights turned on. As her father trifled with the wires, she started to see how everything came together.

Her parents put her into math tutoring to help compensate with the difficulty of learning a new language in French immersion school, and she never lost her curiosity for tinkering. Before long, Benson was taking things apart and putting them back together to understand how they worked. Her parents began to notice her interest in math and science and suggested she consider engineering.

Now, Benson is in her