Cultivating Communities for Women in STEM

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Waffle and Rikopeer

As a problem-solver with entrepreneurship mindset, I aim to create "unleaky" pipeline of Women in STEM together with two organizations.

Waffle is the first nonprofit I co-founded in 2019, targeted to empower and educate middle and high school female students to provide opportunities to select STEM majors at the college entrance. While I served as the co-founder, we successfully provided education to 1000+ students with the support of Google.org, Lenovo Foundation, US Embassy, and more. Such grassroots programs led to success in policy advising to the Japanese government as well, resulting in adding the importance of educating middle and high school female students in “Basic Policies for the Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform” published by the Cabinet Office.


Rikopeer is the second nonprofit I co-founded in 2024, after leaving Waffle and bringing my career focus back to tech again. Rikopeer, as the name implies making peers in Riko (STEM in Japanese), focuses on uniting female students in the engineering department from various universities, aiming at improving the retention of women in engineering. As the universities in the US often have Women in STEM student organizations, our ambition is to make a Rikopper chapter for each university in Japan so that the students can make friends and engage in professional activities together such as forming a hackathon team.  

Please contact me for further reference or support for Rikopeer: asumisaito1@gmail.com


Japan still suffers from the stigma of Women in STEM

The rate of female students in the engineering department in Japan is 16%, ranking at the bottom among OECD countries. Japan holds the 125th position on the Gender Gap Ranking, while the US ranks 43rd. Gender stereotypes are still strongly prevalent in the country, resulting in young women avoiding intellectual paths such as STEM

As a Japanese woman with a STEM background, I am committed to addressing this disparity by creating opportunities for future generations of women to excel in science and technology.

Source: OECD (2022), Research and Development Statistics: R-D personnel by sector of employment and qualification, OECD Science, Technology and R&D Statistics (database), https://doi.org/10.1787/19fc7ea3-en.