Tag: Girls in Science

It’s 2019 and We Still Don’t Have Gender Equality. These 8 Groups Are Fighting to Change That

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Our world is led by men, whether it’s within the government, environmental sector, STEM fields or as the head of the household. NationSwell rounded up eight groups fighting for women’s equality. 
 
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She Should Run

It’s 2019, yet only a third of elected officials at the local, state and federal level are women.  Twenty-two states have never had a woman for governor. The nonprofit She Should Run was founded in 2011 by Erin Loos Cutraro after she noticed a lack of support for women interested in running for government roles. To date, the group has empowered tens of thousands of women to consider running for office, and it has the ambitious goal of raising that number to 250,000 by 2030. The organization hosts an incubator program, which is an online set of courses and mentors. It also has an astonishingly high success rate: Eighty percent of women reported feeling more confident about their path to run for office after completing the training.

UN Women works with governments around the world to fight for equality.

UN Women

Many organizations have a variety of ways of tackling gender inequity. However, UN Women takes a more focused approach by working directly with governments to tackle the issue. The United Nations formed UN Women in 2010 after leaders realized there wasn’t a centralized way to tackle gender equality and women’s empowerment. The group works with government officials worldwide to create laws and legislation that support equal rights for women and girls.
 
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PERIOD

In many countries, the conversation around women’s health still isn’t happening … period. Enter PERIOD. The Menstrual Movement, a nonprofit working to provide education and menstrual supplies to women in the U.S. while breaking down taboos that still exist around monthly cycles. The founder, Nadya Okamoto, drew from her own experience as a homeless teen to start the company after finding there was an unmet need for feminine hygiene products in the homeless community. Though its primary focus is low-income women, her group supplies menstrual products to all women who need them, regardless of economic status. 

Girls who Code provides girls the chance to build a community in the field of computer science.

Girls Who Code

In the battle to close the technology gender gap, Girls Who Code is one of its leaders. Through after-school programs and summer training camps, the nonprofit empowers middle, high school and college girls to pursue degrees in computer science. Since its founding in 2012, Girls Who Code has taught basic coding to 185,000 budding computer scientists. And its impact is making a difference. The enrollment rate for Girls Who Code alumnae who choose to major in a computer-related field is 15 times the national average. 
 
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Women’s Environment and Development Organization

The world is entering a climate crisis, and women are going to be some of the populations hardest hit — particularly rural and indigenous women. The Women’s Environment and Development Organization exists to empower women in the fight against climate change through a variety of training sessions and workshops. While specific topics range from fighting climate change to achieving sustainable development, the organization also advocates for gender equality in climate change policies and planning. 
 
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Girls Not Brides

Every year, over 8 million girls marry before they turn 18, robbing many of the opportunity to choose their own path to womanhood while perpetuating a system where women are inferior to men. Girls Not Brides is a worldwide partnership of over 1,200 organizations working to end this harmful tradition. “It’s happening everywhere,” Lakshmi Sundaram, the global coordinator of Girls Not Brides, told Voices of America. “It may look a bit different in different places, but it is a universal issue.” Using data and personal accounts of girls who have experienced it, the organization works with government and communities in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and Europe to ensure gender equality gets the attention it deserves.

International Planned Parenthood Federation is a global organization advancing sexual and reproductive health.

International Planned Parenthood Federation

International Planned Parenthood Federation has volunteers and workers in over 145 countries helping to ensure that everyone is free to make their own decisions about sexual and reproductive healthcare. While they target marginalized populations and locations around the world, 84 percent of services were specifically aimed at helping women and girls. In 2018, the federation delivered 223.2 million sexual and health services in support of reproductive rights.
 
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National Organization for Women 

Started by a grassroots group of feminists in 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) has hundreds of affiliate offices in all 50 states and is comprised of over 500,000 members. The group works with policymakers via conferences and seminars to ensure women receive equal treatment in every aspect of their lives. Reproductive rights and family law are priorities, as well as civil rights and voter empowerment.
This list provides only a glimpse of the hard work happening around the world to level the playing field for women and girls. Click on any of the organizations above and find out how you can get involved.
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Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that 10 groups were included. This list features eight organizations. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.

The Small Act That Makes a Big Impact on Young Girls

Posted on by robbie

It’s a no-brainer: Kids should be encouraged to study what they love and what they are good at. So, if a girl loves science and math, then that should be applauded, right?
The problem is, there are subtle verbal cues that little girls often hear from a very young age that can discourage a curious mind from exploring these passions.
As this poignant ad from Verizon and Makers.com, a digital video initiative highlighting the accomplishments of women, shows (via Fast Company), a mother tells her daughter, “Sweetie, don’t get your dress dirty,” as she hikes along a stream. Later, when she’s a little older and using power tools on a project, her dad warns, “Careful with that, why don’t you hand that to your brother?”
They are innocent words, but the ad shows they can leave a big impression.
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We previously reported that women hold only 24 percent of STEM jobs (aka: science, technology, engineering, and math). The reasons for the underrepresentation are many: A widely acknowledged institutional bias against female scientists, a lack of mentorship and encouragement of young women scientists, and a general unwelcoming atmosphere in the lab toward females. When women are being left out of these opportunities, it’s bad for the economy as well.
But these statistics don’t have to remain like this forever — and it all starts by simply changing a little of what we say.
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DON’T MISS: Will Mentorship Bring More Diversity to STEM Fields?

Young Women in Technology Band Together in Texas to Succeed

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Latina women have a hard road sometimes when it comes to pioneering careers in the tech industry.
They comprise only 1 percent of college students enrolled in engineering nationally, according to the Dallas Morning News. They can be outnumbered two to one by men in classes for some disciplines.
Students at the Singley Academy in Irving, Texas, take care of their own by offering a much-needed peer support group, Girls for Technology, for young women trying to make their way through the lucrative but male-dominated career path.
The club is a model for how banding together could help girls break into the ranks of science and tech careers — and demonstrate the different, and valuable, viewpoints young women bring to the table.
Singley Academy’s Assistant Principal Kacy Barton, who helped start Girls of Technology, told Avi Selk of the Dallas Morning News, “Females think differently. The guys get wrapped up in the technical side. ‘How are we going to make this work?’ Girls tend to respond to things they see changing the world around them.”
Lesly Hernandez, a senior, wants to work for NASA someday. Hernandez spent part of her childhood in Mexico while her parents worked in the United States. She now lives with her single mother, a food court manager, and a 6-year-old brother she looks after while her mom works. She’s also her household’s repairwoman.
Another club member, Rubi Garcia, showed early signs of science prowess when she smashed her Barbie radio — and then repaired it.
Supporting each other has given the young women confidence as they prepare for college. Women are essential, Barton says, because they think differently.
A man might say, “‘Let’s …do something else.’ And one of the girls reaches over and says, ‘If we just do these two steps, we’ll get this accomplished.'”
Leave it to a young woman to figure out how to engineer something simply.
MORE: These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected with an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds 

These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds

Posted on by robbie

Latina girls are the least likely of any group to indicate that they’re interested in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, according to a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities report. While Latina women comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, they make up just two percent of scientists and engineers.
Luckily, engineer Luz Rivas is aiming to change that with her DIY Girls after school program in her home neighborhood of Pacoima in Los Angeles.
Rivas grew up poor in L.A. with her sister and single mother, often sleeping in other people’s garages because they had no permanent home of their own. In fifth grade, Rivas used a computer at school and immediately fell in love. “I felt like I had a real skill. I always liked things that had a real answer,” she told Erica L Sánchez of NBC News. From then on, she took every science class she could and applied to MIT just to see if she could get in. She did. After overcoming initial fears about leaving L.A., she went to MIT, even though “It felt like it was another country,” she told Sánchez. “I had never met so many students who had parents who were college-educated. It was shocking to see kids whose parents were guiding them. I didn’t have that.”
Now Rivas is stepping in to guide other girls who don’t have role models in STEM fields. After grad school and various engineering jobs, Rivas moved back to Los Angeles in 2013 to start DIY Girls. Most of the fifth grade girls in the DIY Girls after school program are Latina and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Rivas teaches them how to use 3D printers, write computer code, make wearable electronics, build toys, and more.
According to its website, DIY Girls aims to provide “a continuous pathway of support to a technical career” for these girls all the way through high school. Rivas works to develop the girls’ confidence, so that they keep raising their hands and asking questions right on through middle school, when many girls clam up due to peer pressure. DIY Girls expanded its program to a second public school this year.
DIY Girls gets moms involved too, with meetups for women who want to learn technical skills including coding, woodworking, and electronics. Rivas said that many of the girls’ parents work in construction, and become interested in what their daughters are learning. “People in our community are not engineers, but they know how to make things. They know how to make everything,” she told Sánchez. And soon there will be a new generation of women in this neighborhood who can make anything they want to, as well.
MORE: What Has Two Pom-Poms, a Ph.D., and a Passion for Science?
 

Meet the Scientist Who Teaches Neuroscience With a Toy Cockroach

Posted on by robbie

It goes without saying that most kids think bugs are cool. After all, there’s a reason why ant farms and insect jars have been popular toys for several generations now. Michigan’s Greg Gage is hoping to capitalize on this fasciation with bugs in order to spark a brain science revolution.
After a first career in electrical engineering, Gage fell in love with neuroscience and now he wants to share his enthusiasm with kids. While Gage was earning his Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Michigan, he and fellow student Tim Marzullo gave lessons about the brain to kids at nearby inner-city schools. “But it was never quite as cool as what we were doing in our labs,” Gage told Melissa Pandika of Ozy magazine.
So they started to build a machine that would allow students to record when the neurons of insects experienced a voltage spike, sending an electrical impulse to communicate the desire to move a leg, for example. Gage and Marzullo set a goal to only spend $100 and use materials available at hardware stores to build their SpikerBox. Even when the original prototype failed, it generated enough interest that they garnered sufficient donations to continue their quest.
The eventual result — dubbed Backyard Brains — offers a variety of kits and tools for kids to launch their own neuroscience investigations, including the EMG SpikerBox that amplifies the “hidden messages” of the user’s nervous system, and the Roboroach, a kit of tools that allows the user to attach electronics to a roach to briefly control its movements through the microstimulation of its neurons. (The Roboroach is based on a current treatment for Parkinson’s disease.) Backyard Brains also hosts workshops to teach kids how to build their own SpikerBoxes.
The Backyard Brains website outlines the mission behind these products: “The brain is complex, but extremely fascinating. We need more people interested in studying the brain because 20% of the world will have a neurological disorder…and there are no cures!” Gage told Pandika. “I want to find extremely smart people who typically decide ‘I want to be a doctor’ or ‘I want to go to Wall Street.’ We’re hoping to start a neuro-revolution.”
MORE: If You Want Your Daughter to Dream Big, Have Her Play with This Classic Toy

If You Want Your Daughter to Dream Big, Have Her Play With This Classic Toy

Posted on by robbie

Walk down the aisle at your local toy store that houses Barbie, and you’re apt to see Mattel’s signature female toy dressed for all sorts of aspirational careers — from astronaut to entrepreneur. But do the job choices of the popular blonde influence girls that play with her? Two researchers wanted to answer this question.
Aurora Sherman of Oregon State University and Eileen Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz randomly assigned 37 girls between the ages of four and seven to play either with a Doctor Barbie, an identical Barbie in sexualized clothes, or a Mr. Potato Head doll for five minutes. Next, they presented the girls with pictures of the backgrounds to various occupations that did not feature any people in the image. One career depicted was gender neutral (restaurant worker), five were of jobs that a higher concentration of women work (librarian, daycare worker, teacher, nurse, and flight attendant), and five were of jobs that a higher percentage of men work (police officer, construction worker, pilot, doctor, and firefighter). After presenting each picture, the researchers asked the girls if they could do that job and if a boy could do that job.
The results, published in the journal Sex Roles, were startling: Girls that played with either Barbie (which had the same unrealistic body type, regardless of how she was dressed), saw fewer career options for themselves than boys. Girls who played with Mr. Potato Head saw about the same number of career options for themselves as boys. In an email that Sherman wrote to Megan Gannon of Live Science (a website featuring the latest in scientific news), she said, “One psychological theory indicates that adult women who are given cues of sexualization (through dress or pictures) perform worse on academic tasks. My co-author and I speculate that Barbie might work as the same kind of cue for girls, but more research is needed to fully test this speculation.”
Our guess is that now, a lot of parents are going to encourage their daughters to play with the goofy-looking spud instead of the trendy lady from Malibu.
MORE: Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?
 
 

One Small Tweak Made a World of Difference in This Computer Science Class

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Something revolutionary happened last spring at the University of California Berkeley. For the first time ever, as far as digitized records indicate, more women than men enrolled in Professor Dan Garcia’s introductory computer science course, “Beauty and Joy of Computing.” Men have long outnumbered women in computer science majors, earning 81.8% of the bachelor’s degrees according to a 2010 National Science Foundation report, and are far more represented in careers in the field. So professors at Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere have retooled their computer science classes, especially introductory ones, with the hopes of attracting more women to them.
Garcia told Kristen V. Brown of the San Francisco Chronicle that he conceived his computer science class for non majors as being more than “just programming,” and he made it “kind of right-brained as well.”
Sumer Mohammed took Garcia’s course without plans to major in computer science, and the class changed her mind. She’s now an electrical engineering and computer science major. In recent years Berkeley and Stanford have about doubled their computer science enrollment among women, who now comprise 21% of the students in this discipline at each school.
MORE: What Has Two Pom-Poms, a Ph.D., and a Passion for Science? 

What Has Two Pom-Poms, a Ph.D. and a Passion for Science?

Posted on by robbie

Wendy Brown is a cheerleader for the Oakland Raiderettes, performing dance routines at football games for which she makes $5 an hour. But Brown thinks girls should be more interested in following her example into her other occupation: scientist. When she’s not shaking pompoms, Brown is earning her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the University of California Davis. That’s why she’s a member of the Science Cheerleaders, a group of women with big smiles and even bigger brains, who share an ambition to get young girls to think differently about careers in science and engineering.
Brown told Zack Seward of Onward, “Our ultimate goals are to inspire young people to be interested in science, specifically young girls, and to playfully challenge stereotypes.” The Science Cheerleaders, whose members also include professional cheerleaders for the Redskins, the Titans, and the Kansas City Chiefs who are studying and working in such fields as engineering, neuroscience, and pathology, performed at the half time of a recent Philadelphia 76ers game, where they were introduced with information about their research interests and led the crowd in a participatory science project.
Hilary Nicholson, a cheerleader who’s working toward a Ph.D. at Brown, told Seward, “I stand out on the court and they announce I’m a molecular pharmacology and physiology Ph.D. student, and I have my hair curled and I’m wearing a short suit and it doesn’t look like what they’re expecting. That polar opposite perception really drives the point home.” Three cheers for that!
MORE: Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?

Inside the Movement to Train a Nation of Female Scientists

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On January 8, Million Women Mentors launched an ambitious initiative to find a million women working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers to become mentors for young women. They’ve already had 44,000 experienced professionals sign up to help, either through in-person or online mentoring or by providing internships or job opportunities.
Million Women Mentors is collaborating with 42 partner organizations, including 4-H, Girls Inc., and the Girl Scouts, who will connect them with girls seeking mentorship. They’ve also lined up corporate sponsors such as Walmart, Cisco and General Motors.
The unprecedented joint effort behind Million Women Mentors seeks to turn around some troubling statistics: women earn 60 percent of undergraduate degrees, but only 11 percent of computer science degrees. And women make up nearly half the American work force, but only hold 24 percent of the jobs in STEM fields. Julie Kantor, chief partnership officer for STEMconnector, says that the trouble starts in middle school when girls who are naturally interested in science begin to feel that they don’t fit in science classes because the number of other girls taking them decrease. “That’s when ‘I hate math, I hate science’ starts for girls,” Kantor told Gregory M. Lamb of the Christian Science Monitor. With the help of the Million Women Mentors initiative, hopefully we’ll put the days of Barbie dolls saying “Math class is tough!”  long behind us.
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This Teacher is Helping Young Girls Literally Build Their Way to a Better Future

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Emily Pilloton needed to teach fundamental social and life skills to her students, so the teacher and designer did that the only way she knew how — through an innovative, hands-on shop class.
Now, the shop class has followed her from Bertie County, N.C., to Berkeley, Calif., where she founded Camp H, an after-school camp that teaches design and building skills to girls 9 to 12 years old. Why girls? Pilloton told Slate she noticed her male students were more willing to readily tackle problems while female students usually wanted a set of directions or steps before attempting the project. “There aren’t enough spaces for girls to be together as girls doing things that feel audacious,” Pilloton told Slate. “I don’t want girls to just be given a hammer and say ‘You’re holding a hammer, that’s awesome!’ I want to teach them how to weld. And to work on projects that don’t feel artsy and craftsy. Not like straight-up wood shop, but to balance the creative and the artistic side.”
Pilloton is now teaching an after-school class that will teach girls “to fix the things that need repair, installation, and maintenance in our everyday lives,” which will include checking the air pressure in tires, fun experiments and core math and science concepts — subjects that students often become bored with during Pilloton’s target age group. In the future, the program plans to have students build furniture and lighting for women’s shelters.
“I want the projects either to have a personal connection or to teach the girls about being a citizen,” Pilloton told Slate. “I will never ever just give a girl or a student a set of plans and tell her to follow instructions.”
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