When the EU launched a short viral video to publicise their It’s a Girl Thing! campaign to get more women into science, it all kicked off in the blogosphere and twitterverse. The 45 second promo, which looks like a cross between a cosmetics ad and a girl group music video, begins with a young good-looking lab-coated male scientist looking up from his microscope to the shocking (and arousing?) sight of three attractive young women dressed in very high heels and even shorter skirts. These women giggle and provocatively gesture their way through the ad, intercut with overflowing test-tubes, models of molecules, lipstick and other girlie and scientific ephemera. Oh, and one of them gets to elegantly scribble symbols on a transparent board. At the end their fashionable shades transform into equally fashionable safety goggles. The music, with its single lyric, reminds us: ‘Science – It’s a Girl Thing!’ So is this how to ‘sell’ science to girls? Continue reading “Selling Science as ‘a Girl Thing’”
Where are the women scientists online?
GEA executive member Heather Mendick and GEA member Marie-Pierre Moreau have been spending a lot of their time looking for women who work in science, engineering and technology online – across websites as diverse as the BBC, YouTube, New Scientist and the Natural History Museum. Their research is funded by the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and is uncovering some disturbing patterns: the dominance of men, the segregation of women into particular areas of science or areas of the website, a greater focus on women’s than on men’s appearance and on their family relationships and a pervasive sexualisation of women scientists.