Less than 0.5% percent of the population currently serves in the armed forces. Out of this 0.5%, 42,000 are members of the United States Coast and of these 42,000 “guardians”, 30% are women. One of these few dedicated women in the Coast Guard is Captain Melissa L. Rivera, the current commandant of cadets at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut where she is responsible for the actions of over 900 cadets. In the 24 years since Rivera’s graduation from the Coast Guard Academy, she has seen a growth of women in the coast guard from less than 10% to 30% as of 2015. This slow but steady growth of women in the aviation field is attributed to the female role models in the aviation community such as Captain Melissa Rivera.…show more content… STEM related careers or careers in science, technology, engineering and math, related only contain 15.5% of women (Driscoll). As mentioned in an iSeek article about women in STEM, this number is likely attributed to the fact that there simply is a shortage of female mentors in STEM. The same applied to women in aviation and the Coast Guard in general when Rivera initially was enrolled. Rivera however is no stranger to the atypical: her mother worked as a computer engineer in the 70’s and 80’s while being a single mother in time where divorce was not socially acceptable. Rivera says that her mother instilled in her at a young age that “[she] would have to work twice as hard to be taken half as…show more content… From a young age girls are not taught their full potential in tackling challenges, similar to what Rivera speaks to about young girls not even knowing they could be pilots “too few have been taught to exercise their personal power or even know that they have power” (Gross). When Rivera took over as commanding office at air-station Kodiak, the biggest air-station on the United States Coast Guard, she realized she was “under a bit of a microscope” simply due to the fact that she was different. More than anything Rivera detests any questions of “what is it like to be a female…” to which she always responded “I don’t know what it’s like to be a male anything!” Drawing attention to the idea that simply because a woman is in a position typically occupied by a male that there must be something drastically different between the two. Rivera has overcome the challenge in in her 24 years in the Coast Guard by being part of the 10% at the academy when she enrolled in 1988 and then becoming part of a crew on a ship with 75 men and 2 women. Rivera continues to mentor the women in aviation “without being pushy or overbearing, without and agenda or making them feel uncomfortable” making her a supportive and encouraging role models or women throughout aviation and the Coast
