This post is Jin Seopart of Mashable's ongoing series TheWomen Fixing STEM, which highlights trailblazing women in science, tech, engineering, and math, as well as initiatives and organizations working to close the industries' gender gaps.
Women have made invaluable, groundbreaking contributions to science, technology, engineering, and math. Yet if you're a girl who doesn't see that represented in popular culture, you might think a STEM career is for men — particularly those who solve problems with equal measures of brilliance and bluster.
SEE ALSO: Latinas hold only 2% of STEM jobs. These 5 women are working to fix that.
A new Ad Council campaign called "She Can STEM" wants to change that stereotype with short videos that feature girls meeting women who are STEM superstars. That includes Maya Gupta, research scientist at Google, Bonnie Ross, head of Microsoft Halo Game Studio, Lucianne Walkowicz, astronomer at the Adler Planetarium, and Tiera Fletcher, structural analysis engineer at Boeing.
The videos offer a behind-the-scenes look at a woman's career, or take the viewer into a one-on-one conversation between a female scientist and a young girl. The clips are meant to provide girls with more STEM role models.
Despite some progress toward increasing the number of women in STEM, they still remain woefully underrepresented. Only 1 in 4 college-educated women work in STEM, even though they make up half of college-educated workers in the U.S. While the gender gap in STEM also reflects bias, exclusion, and discrimination in classrooms and workplaces, the Ad Council campaign is taking aim at pervasive stereotypes.
"When girls don’t feel encouraged and empowered in STEM, we see serious consequences not only for girls and women, but also for the future of innovation in our country," Lisa Sherman, president and CEO of the Ad Council, said in a statement. "If we want women at the forefront of the next generation of STEM leaders, we must show young girls that it is possible. If they can see it, they can be it."
To develop and launch the campaign, the Ad Council, a nonprofit organization that produces and distributes public service advertising, created a coalition of partners that includes the companies GE, Microsoft, Google, Verizon, IBM, and the nonprofit organizations Black Girls Code, Girl Scouts of the USA, and Girls Who Code. The partners will share campaign content across their online channels, and girls can find more information about STEM careers on the She Can STEM website as well as the initiative's Instagram handle.
Now's the time to dream big, girls.
Topics Social Good
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