Jane Cosmetics at 2014 Championship

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Katie_UPS

Unsurprisingly to me, this report suggests that getting girls involved in STEM activities at all ages and explicitly telling all students that their skill levels (in all fields) are not fixed at birth (this has moderate supporting evidence) is an effective way. This actually has stronger evidence in success than female STEM role models(low supporting evidence).

This is totally anecdotal and thus will not have as much value as Katie's excellent posts on this topic, but I just want to reiterate this point. A pervasive belief in younger students I've worked with, particularly the women, is the nagging idea that they're not "smart enough" for this stuff. These students get discouraged when they attempt something they don't start out particularly great at, especially when other (male) peers seem to breeze through it. I don't know why, but there seems to be a greater tendency in the young women I've mentored to feel that skill in something is inherent and not improvable with practice. Working to defeat this idea is important. Showing that everyone can get better or even become the best at a task they did not start out good at is crucial. In some way engineering "rock stars" can sometimes make a task seem even more daunting: the idea sometimes becomes that only these amazing, remarkable people find success in STEM.

Mentoring small groups of people through a new task and sticking with them as they improve on it, gradually reducing your role in the task, seems to be in my experience a really effective way of breaking through this barrier. This year we had a few first year men and women who didn't feel particularly skilled at anything and weren't sure where they wanted to be on the team. I started the build season with them leading them through the prototype of our gripper. At first it was mostly me-directed and they received tasks. As we prototyped through the weeks I consciously tried to step farther and farther back, letting them take more and more charge of it, until by the end of the season this team assembled the competition claw without me even attending the meeting. Their skill set grew dramatically, they took ownership of the project (iterated the design based solely on *their* idea), and they're absolutely inspired.

The point I'm getting at here is that effective inspirational mechanisms seem to have a common theme: communicating the idea that "you can do it too". Inspiration should be making these aspirations seem possible and within reach. I think there's value in showing that you don't have to be a specific "kind" of woman to be a STEM hero, but I think this role-model ism needs to be coupled with other forms of inspiration to really sink in. Otherwise you just present another example of how "only super humans can do STEM".

Maybe a few women who otherwise wouldn't enter our lab would because of this program, and that would be great. There needs to be some caution though in including a company whose business model inherently rides on the patriarchal idea of a woman's worth being partly determined by her appearance. Then again, we happily welcome companies who profit off of war into FRC, with open arms, so maybe this isn't such a big deal