How to Win Girls Hearts with STEM Education
[Music]
you’re such a nerd
no one likes you
another girl said that to me when i was
five years later i started my freshman
year at mit
and in my class men outnumbered women
two to one
today i’m an engineer an educator
an entrepreneur and a mom to two amazing
kids who love
stem my super power is my creativity
and i am not alone a microsoft study
found that 91
of 5th through 12th grade girls consider
themselves creative
and 72 percent say that a job that helps
the world
matters to them that makes stem
a great career fit for girls because
with science technology engineering and
math you can be creative
and help the world at the same time
so why is it that according to the
society of women engineers
only 26 of computer scientists
and 13 percent of engineers are female
clearly girls are checking out of stem
and we are missing out on all their
creativity
that’s a problem today i’m going to
share with you the three reasons why i
stuck with stem
despite what that girl said to me so
that you can help a girl in your life
stick with it too
and i’ll open up about my middle school
nightmare
because that’s when i struggled the most
being 12 was tough for me
the pre-teen years are when you start
caring about what other people
think and that turns middle school into
this giant dressing room where
everyone’s trying on new friends
and new identities to see what sticks
that’s the time when a girl might decide
she’s going to reject stem because she
doesn’t think it fits anymore
and it is not enough for you to reassure
her
oh you’ve got this uh-uh
she has to want it when i was in middle
school
my self-image was in the toilet and i
spent an
eternity in that dressing room but i
never
once shed my passion for
stem because at a time in my life when i
felt like a loser
three things lifted me up
dirty hands x-ray eyes and role models
they showed me that i could be a
superhero someday
and i spotted that cape and i wanted it
let’s go back in time here i am at age
four
and life was good because everyone’s
your friend when you’re four
here i am at age eight the start of the
tween years
and social awareness is just beginning
to creep in
here i am at age 11 and i was clearly
not one of the cool kids
but i was okay because i had a bubble of
friends but then the bubble
popped just like that popped because my
dad
was in the navy and he got transferred
from
pensacola florida to virginia beach so i
had to start seventh grade as the new
girl
that’s when i found out very quickly
everyone
is not your friend
at the bus stop this girl named lori
would point to my clothes
and everyone would snicker
and if you got straight a’s you had your
name read out loud in the morning
announcements
and when my name got red this girl named
sheena who sat behind me
leaned forward slowly and hissed in my
ear
you’re such a nerd no one
likes you
so after that
i begged one of my teachers to please
give me a b
even if i earned an a just so my name
wouldn’t come up
i started dreading school and when the
yearbook came out
i scribbled out my own picture
and i threw the book away i was being
made fun of for the way i looked so
guess what i started changing it
i bought the end clothes i started
wearing makeup
then i got this bright idea what if i
got rid of my glasses
so i asked my parents if i could get
contacts and my mom said well
i didn’t get contacts until i was in
high school so if you want them now you
need to pay for them yourself
so you know what i did i saved all my
babysitting money
for months and in eighth grade i
presented my parents with a wad of cash
and a newspaper clipping a local eye
doctor was running a contact lens
special
so i got my wish shedding the glasses
shut down this script that was scrolling
in my head that said
if you don’t look like a loser maybe
you’ll belong
now as an adult i know looks aren’t what
matter
but when i was 13 yeah they mattered
a lot and i was so convinced my life
would be transformed
that the placebo effect kicked in
i started reaching out to people i was
too intimidated to speak to before and i
discovered
they would talk to me so i started
making friends
back then you wrote real notes with
actual pen and paper and you slipped
them to your friends
and i soon had a whole pile of them
i got invited to parties and i even got
my first kiss i thought i had arrived
but there was a problem they say you’re
the average of the five people
you spend the most time with
let’s just say some of my new friends
were
good at coming up with bad ideas
but just in the nick of time my dad got
transferred again
this time to jacksonville florida so we
had to pick up and move all
over again that was a blessing in
disguise
because it forced me to hit the reset
button on my peer group
and i had a secret weapon i had
never lost my love through for stem that
whole time
and this time i looked for kids who
shared it
and were good influences on me
i ended up graduating at the top of my
class
earning a degree in engineering from mit
and starting up an optical fiber
facility for corning
in north carolina so throughout
all middle school i experimented like
crazy
i varied my friends my looks my identity
but i held stem constant
why because i saw three things
that told me stem was a super power
number one dirty hands
my seventh grade science teacher gave us
this unforgettable homework assignment
go in the woods find a puddle and bring
a jar of that dirty water to school
the next school day we found that the
classroom had been transformed and there
were microscopes on
every single table and he said
today we’re going on the great amoeba
hunt
inside your jars of water
when i found an amoeba i spotted it
myself and i had caught it myself
i felt powerful like a real scientist
and that made up for all those times
that lori laughed at me
and she knows whispering stuff in my ear
so get girls hands dirty
get them repairing bikes doing robotics
woodworking and at home
get tools in her hands it builds spatial
thinking and confidence you can start
with something small like hanging
pictures on the wall
and if your walls look like swiss cheese
yes so what she can spackle it
buy her a tool box for her birthday and
invite people
to help you fill it up every year
that’s a gift that she will treasure for
the rest of her life
tell her she can get something new for
her room but make sure it says
assembly required here’s the second
reason why i stuck with stem
x-ray eyes when i was growing up one of
my favorite tv shows was the super
friends and i loved
the wonder twins it was a brother and
sister pair
and they would transform themselves into
animals
buckets of water ice picks they were
creative and they would beat the bad
guys and save the day with their
creativity
that’s the kind of work that grabs girls
hearts
it grabbed mine with stem
you can be creative and save the day
every day that makes you
a superhero powerful
and valued and those were two feelings
i craved when i was in middle school
my grandfather had x-ray eyes he was a
doctor by training but he was an
engineer at heart
and he invented his own tooth flossers
decades ago because he was tired of how
every time he flossed his teeth if the
floss got too tight his fingertips would
turn purple
so he made his own tooth flossers by
filing down plastic forks
and attaching thread across the tines he
had countless prototypes and he’d show
them to me and he said
my idea can help other people it just
needs to be tested
and scaled guess what
that takes stem
someone else who had x-ray eyes was a 13
year old girl named susie mason
she had asthma back in the 50s the
medicine came in glass nebulizers
and susie was always afraid she was
going to break it or
spill it so she asked her father
why can’t my medicine come in a spray
can like hairspray
he worked at riker labs and so he posed
that same
question to the scientists there and
within months
they had invented the world’s first
pressurized metered dose inhalers
so here’s how you can help a girl
develop x-ray eyes like my grandpa
and susie had the next time she comes
complaining to you about something
that’s driving her nuts
ask her one simple question
how would you change this
frustration breeds creativity
that brings me to the third reason why i
stuck with stem and it is the most
important role models
so now you know from my story i had my
grandfather
and my science teacher help
girls find role models
watch hidden figures read books like
stem gems which feature female role
models
follow instagramers who show that stem
can be
fun and zany like mary anning’s revenge
watch talks by samayra mehta a girl who
invented a board game so that
other kids could know how to code or dr
joy wolfram who’s developing
nanoparticles to treat cancer
or dr sabrina gonzalez pastersky
a physicist who built and flew her own
plane when she was a girl
but do you want to know who the most
powerful role model of offer a girl
is it’s someone she knows
just an ordinary person
who’s blending stem and creativity to
help others
they might not be curing cancer or
designing drones
but stem contributions don’t have to be
glamorous
they just have to be meaningful
when i was an engineer for corning i was
helping make the internet faster
for people all over the world and
believe me
my work was powerful and
valued so girls
seek ways to be creative and to help
others
and stem gives it to them
join me in helping them see that
if you take nothing else away from this
talk
remember these three things dirty hands
x-ray eyes and role models
help a girl find those and you just
might unleash a superhero
thank you
[Music]
you