As an estimated 35 million people tune in to watch Shark Week this summer, chances are they’ll catch two things: the ocean’s most fearsome Great White predators tearing up their prey, and the predominantly male conservationists who protect them.
Though some of the programming might take liberty with the science, Shark Week does nail one thing exactly right: it’s an unfortunately accurate depiction of gender disparities in science.
Currently, women represent half of the college-educated workforce but hold only 28% of the nation’s science and engineering careers, according to the National Science Board. Gills Club aims to raise that percent by supporting young girls to be the next generation of shark scientists.
The Gills Club, an education initiative by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, is fighting against stigmas girls and women face in STEM fields. The initiative started after co-founders Cynthia Wigren and Marianne Long heard time and time again that “sharks are for boys.”
Now they’re making sure people know that sharks — and the field of professional science that studies them — are for everyone.
“It got us really thinking about how these women who worked in the field with sharks can really be a very strong and needed role model for these young girls,” Long told Boston Magazine. “So we wanted to build that connection to them.”
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“These girls, if they’re watching Shark Week and they’re not seeing women scientists and then they’re being told at school that sharks are just for boys, they’re being discouraged from following their passion,” Wigren told PRI. “So for us connecting them to these women shark scientists doing amazing work was really important.”
The group consists of a cohort of more than 90 women researchers and conservationists. Each month, the organization hosts events across the country for younger girls to join. They’ll step inside the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, or visit the Newport Aquarium in landlocked Kentucky. Here, girls will gain exposure to sharks and career paths. Girls usually between 8 and 12 years old might learn about why 16% of all shark species are threatened with extinction or the important role sharks play in the ocean ecosystem. On top of that, the organization also hosts online events for girls to attend, and it created a Facebook Group for scientists to connect and network
To see the effect Gills Club has had on its participants, all you have to do is talk to Ella, a little girl the organization empowered to pursue a career in science. Because of their efforts, the 6-year-old now knows 12 scientific shark names — the first step on her journey toward becoming a marine biologist when she grows up.
“I try to teach people how important sharks are to the ocean and the whole world,” she said.
And it’s not just Ella, over 400 girls have attended in-person Gills Club events.
The girls in the Gills Club aren’t just fighting for a future for sharks, they’re fighting for their own future. Here’s how you can be a part of it.
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Tag: Girls in STEM
Want Your Kid to Pursue Science? Have Them Dress the Part
In order to encourage more of the nation’s young people to pursue careers in science, it pays to help them dress the part.
That is the key finding of a study we conducted recently to determine what kind of effect a simple article of clothing – in this case white lab coats – have on students’ confidence in their ability to do science. We also wanted to know if lab coats help students see themselves as scientists and aspire to science careers.
We are science education researchers interested in understanding how the symbols and tools of science can promote students’ interest in studying science.
This is an important topic because jobs in science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM jobs — are not only important for the economy, but are also growing faster and pay more than many other fields.
Although the number of jobs in STEM fields are increasing, the number of people choosing to major in those fields remains below what is needed to fill the positions.
THE POWER OF CLOTHING
In order to encourage more young people to choose to major in STEM fields and pursue STEM careers, we believe it is important to help them see themselves as someone who can be successful in those fields. One item often associated with scientists is the white lab coat.
Clothing can be a powerful tool for changing one’s self-image, as seen in previous studies of the effects of suits and lab coats on adults.
In an effort to help students see themselves as scientists and as individuals who can be successful in science, we conducted a study that put students in lab coats for science instruction. Our team worked with five fifth-grade teachers from four rural schools who taught at least two science classes.
SAME LESSONS, DIFFERENT ATTIRE
For each teacher, students in one of the classes wore lab coats for at least 10 class periods over the course of two months. The other class did not wear lab coats. The teachers taught the same lessons to each class to minimize the differences between teachers. The participants were interviewed before and after the 10 lessons and also took a pre- and post-survey that explored many factors, such as their sense of self as a scientist, their confidence in their skills related to science, and whether they had career goals related to STEM fields.
For the 110 youth in the group who didn’t wear lab coats, there were no statistically significant changes in their responses from the pretest to post-test for any question on the written survey. However, for the students who wore the lab coats, there was a significant increase in their perceptions of whether others see them as scientists.
More specifically, of the 72 students who wore lab coats, 47 percent changed their responses on the post-survey to indicate they feel like others see them as someone who likes science.
Also, of the 42 lab coat–wearing students who had low levels of confidence in their science skills, 45 percent changed their responses on the post-test to positive responses. Another 36 percent of the students in lab coats with low levels of self-confidence did not change their response from the pre- to post-test but this included the students who already felt they had high levels of recognition.
POSITIVE EFFECTS
To test for performance and competence in science, students were asked questions such as “I think I am good at science” and “I am good at using science tools like thermometers, rulers or magnifying glasses.” The youth who wore lab coats but had low levels of self-confidence had a significant increase in their responses to these questions. More specifically, 60 percent of the students changed their answer from disagree to agree.
To test for career aspirations, the students were asked questions such as “I would like to have a job that uses science.” For the students wearing the lab coats who had low confidence in their science skills, 50 percent changed their answers from disagree to agree.
A WORTHY INVESTMENT
The bottom line: is that for youth who initially had low levels of confidence in their science skills, the lab coats had a significant improvement in their beliefs in their abilities, their levels of recognition and their science career aspirations.
Of course, lab coats cannot supplant a solid science education. At the same time, these simple articles of clothing may represent an inexpensive way to help more young people get interested in science and see themselves as future scientists.
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Megan Ennes is a graduate research assistant and M. Gail Jones is a professor of STEM education, both at North Carolina State University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
They’re Learning STEM Skills by Dancing to Destiny’s Child
At the start of the L train in the upper-class Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, there are 10 city-funded Wi-Fi hubs within two blocks. When the train hits Brooklyn, two miles east, there are another six Wi-Fi hubs being installed in the hip East Williamsburg area. But the numbers start to fall as the train dives deeper into Brooklyn, where poverty is rampant. By the time it hits the neighborhoods of East New York and Brownsville, there are none.
Out here, almost a third of homes don’t have internet access — the gateway to a community’s broader participation in STEM industries and the jobs they offer. High schools, meanwhile, are under-equipped with the basic infrastructure needed for internet access and technology education. Music, dance and the arts, in contrast, are well established in the community.
This disconnect — in the midst of a national trend to move funding from the humanities to STEM — is what led Yamilée Toussaint, a mechanical engineering graduate from MIT, to start STEM From Dance, a program for high school girls that merges the local culture of dance and music with a future in learning complex science and technology concepts.
“Students who would be a natural fit for, say, a career as a coder don’t necessarily know that until they are introduced to it,” Toussaint says. “Through dance, we’re attracting them to a different world that they wouldn’t otherwise opt-in themselves.”
Toussaint, a tiny woman with large hair and a soft voice, created the program five years ago. Normally it spans a full semester, but this year she increased the number of girls she can reach with a summer intensive curriculum focused on circuitry.
During the course of one week, participants practice a dance routine that they pair with lessons on building and coding circuits.
“It was hard at first,” says Chantel Harrison, a 17-year-old participant from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “I didn’t know what it was about, honestly.”
Harrison and a couple dozen other girls are taught to wire battery-powered light circuits. They sew them into their dance costumes to create splashy light effects synced to a song’s beat. For many of them, this is their first introduction to computer science and coding.
And that is a stark reality check. In New York City, where technology often seems boundless — and where there have been huge strides to build up “Silicon Alley,” New York City’s own version of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley — kids educated in the city’s outer borough’s face significant barriers to a future working in the tech industry.
“If we cannot allow our children to have first-class computer equipment in a first-class city, they’re not going to be prepared to be employed at a first-rate corporation,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tells NationSwell. “We cannot have a digital divide in our borough and in our city.”
Both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have pushed for high-speed internet access and STEM course integration into the city’s high school curriculum by 2025. But in Brooklyn, a study published in December 2016 by the Brooklyn Borough President’s office found there is progress to be made: Internet access is subpar (the average rating is 3 out of 5) in the district’s schools; there are only enough tablets and laptops for 7 and 20 percent of the borough’s student population, respectively; and 70 percent of schools don’t have an established computer science curriculum.
“The mayor has a very strong goal, but the question is, are we set up to meet this goal based on current investments in schools?” says Stefan Ringel, a spokesperson for Adams. He adds that reaching the 2025 goal will require more investments in infrastructure upgrades as well as in the curriculum.
“There is a lot of talk around getting these students active in STEM education, but I’d say for our program, if we have 12 girls sign up, maybe one has actually been exposed to coding,” says Toussaint, as she watches a group of six teenagers practice a dance routine to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”
“We’re not trying to make engineers or professional dancers within a week,” says Arielle Snagg, an instructor with STEM From Dance who also has a degree in neuroscience. “But we are hoping to give them an idea on how they can use technology within this art.”
Snagg, originally from Bushwick — another impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood — says she understands the plight of students who live in these parts of New York. Of those who work (and only about half the population does), just 5 percent do so within the tech and science fields. And getting more women into technology can help a labor force that is desperate for diversity, especially when it comes to women of color.
After a week in the camp, Harrison, who will be a senior at Achievement First Brooklyn High School in the fall, says she gained a new appreciation for the integration of dance and science. “And I’ve gotten better in math — I’ve even learned to love it.”
Next spring, Toussaint will see her first group of students graduate from high school. And though she hopes that many of them pursue technology in college, more than anything she wants them to enter any career with confidence.
“The point is to let [these girls] know that they can do anything, and they don’t have to do one thing,” she says. “They just have to open up their minds a bit.”
Can Girls Dance Their Way Toward Computer Programming Careers?
Lately, educators have stressed the importance of attracting more girls to STEM areas of study (science, technology, engineering and math) — especially computer programming, since men outnumber women 7 to 3 in tech industry careers. But now, a group of researchers at South Carolina’s Clemson University have hit upon a unique way to spark girls’ interest in software engineering: through dance.
Dr. Shaundra Daily, an assistant professor of computing at Clemson who was the lead author in a study published in Technology, Knowledge and Learning, found that the computational skills of fifth and sixth grade girls improved after they interacted with dance choreography software. Daily hit upon this idea because she was a competitive dancer who now leads her own computer lab at Clemson.
Through the Virtual Environment Interactions (VEnvl) software, the girls were able to program three-dimensional characters to perform dance moves just by moving their own bodies. The girls learned to develop new computing strategies to improve their choreography.
Dr. Alison Leonard, an assistant professor of education at Clemson who co-authored the study, says in a press release that dance and software engineering have more in common than you might think: “Executing one bit of code or movement one after the other exists in both programming and choreography. Likewise, loops or repeating a set of steps, also occur in both contexts.”
One of the goals of Daily’s research is to determine how to encourage more girls to become involved with computing. “We want more diverse faces around the table, helping to come up with technological solutions to societal issues,” she says. “So we’re working with girls to create more pathways to support their participation.”
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Can Google Crack the Code for More Female Computer Scientists?
With technology being such a booming and prevalent industry, it does seem a bit odd that, in general, it’s failed to reach such an important demographic: Girls.
As females make a large impact in colleges and in the workforce (more than 40 percent of women are their family’s breadwinner), they have been unable to make their break in the computer science industry. Which is why companies like Google and other nonprofits are looking to reverse that trend.
Computer science is one of the fastest growing fields with job projection numbers poised to reach 4.2 million by 2020, yet less than 1 percent of high school girls are interested in it. Additionally, the number of women in the computer science industry dropped from 37 percent in 1980s to 18 percent now. Furthermore, only 7 percent of venture capitalist deals go to female founders and CEOs, and only 20 percent of the 300,000 students in AP computer science classes are girls.
Which is why Google is now stepping in and launching its “Made with Code” campaign targeting girls. The first component is a video featuring girls meeting President Obama. In the background, a voice says: “You are a girl who understands bits exist to be assembled. When you learn to code, you can assemble anything that you see missing. And in so doing, you will fix something, or change something, or invent something, or run something, and maybe that’s how you will play your bit in this world.”
An interactive website is next. Featured on the site are bios of female role models who write software that designs fabrics or choreographs dances. The site also has entertaining coding lessons and a directory of coding programs — all aimed at young women.
Google is also offering $50 million in grants as well as partnering with nonprofits, such as Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that was started two years ago and organizes girls’ summer coding institutes.
Google’s initiative is a great first step, and hopefully with the support of additional groups, the numbers of female coders will grow.
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Young Women in Technology Band Together in Texas to Succeed
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.
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These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
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.
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Meet the Scientist Who Teaches Neuroscience With a Toy Cockroach
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.”
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If You Want Your Daughter to Dream Big, Have Her Play With This Classic Toy
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.
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One Small Tweak Made a World of Difference in This Computer Science Class
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.
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