Apparently it was Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day yesterday, so some might say I missed it. But as you know, I think that every day should be Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, so it is not too late! Have a look a website for it I found (here). What can you do? You don’t have to organise a huge event (although feel free to). It can all start small. Maybe for that next gift, consider (if you don’t already) buying your little girl (or someone else’s) a set of LEGO or an electronics kit (or other hands on building toys) instead of the (fill-in-the-blank-standard-girl-toy) everyone else is getting her. Go ahead and make it a pink kit, if you want, since that’s what society seems to want. Who cares what colour it is? Apart from buying, even just chatting a bit with a child about engineering in our lives, and all the people who can (and do) contribute to it would be a great thing to do.
Here’s a short film from our own Viterbi school of engineering:
If still in the market for film, here’s a 2012 video on the topic from the DiscoverE site I linked above:
Enjoy!
-cvj
And which society says that girls want it pink.
-Sorry, didn’t finish my rant properly. I was up all night with my sick non-pink science loving daughter.
Please don’t make it pink because you think that’s what society wants! Because it’s not; it’s what most of the major marketing firms want you to think, that toys need to be genderized and that children have to have separate toys signified by either being pink (girl) or any other color (boys). It is completely infuriating that toy companies pigeon hole girls and boys into liking different separate things. And Lego is unfortunately following the market trend even further as the pink sets are also “bakeries” and “hair salons” that contain only girl mini-figures while the non-pink sets are rocket ships and race cars and city scales that contain mostly male mini-figures and occasionally a token female mini-fig. Last year, Lego released a limited edition Research Institute containing 3 female scientists. It sold out within hours. Even after countless pleas to make this a permanent set, Lego maintained that it was only a limited edition and there was no market to continue with it. Several months later (coincidently right before Christmas), Lego released the Research Institute again as a limited run, only to overload their website and sell out that day. You come to your own conclusions which society dictates that girls aren’t interested.
Sounds great – congratulations to her! Also sounds like congrats are in order to her for designing a working realisation of the Caterpillar drive from The Hunt For Red October? Très awes. 😉
-cvj
Great coincidence! Just this morning I sat on a committee that awarded an engineering master’s degree to a young woman from Kenya who designed and built a totally internal (plunger-driven) propulsion system for underwater robotic vehicles. It was extremely cool!