sparkly labcoats

[No1blueengine]

I work for a major international financial institution. HR sponsor various special interest alliances within the company which lobby for their causes. One of the special interest alliances is "Women and Allies". It concerns itself with promoting equality in the workplace, etc etc.

They have managed to obtain some funding to host a STEM event. Women are hugely underrepresented in our actuarial and data analysis dept and the alliance would like to encourage girls and young women to consider careers in these fields. They have invited a boatload of girls from local secondary schools to attend one of our sites for an day long STEM event in September.

I received an invitation yesterday for my daughter(s). Apparently the girls will spend the morning decorating lab coats before hearing from a range of speakers about STEM careers.

Decorating lab coats. I shit you not.

My jaw hit the floor. i thought it must be joke but apparently it is not. I keep trying to draft an email to the organizers but i cant get past spluttering outrage. A (female) colleague cant see what i am getting upset about, though thinks the money could have been better spent on pay rises.

I think it is insulting to girls intelligence that the organizers felt they needed to offer this activity (and dedicate such a substantial amount of time to it) to get the girls to attend and reflects the influence of underlying stereotypes on their thinking.

My 14 y/o step daughter built a functional robot in school last term and my 7 y/o daughter is very excited to be going to learn to code in September. Somehow they were both excited by their projects without sparkly lab coat inducements.

Above-mentioned colleague thinks i am getting worked up over nothing. AIBU?

greenlightforgirls.org/g4g-day/

Look they can get girls to make a giant daisy too.

Damn, I was hoping for CAD designs, CAM cut outs and then some sublimation press on to the labcoat.

Email them! Maybe say they should have talked to women inSTEM - or school girls! - before setting this up.
Say girls get into STEM because they are inspired by the subject and people in their field and hearing about possibilities. Not by decorating lab coats which is in itself yet another stereotype! I mean unles your data analysis needs to wear them in your workplace.....

www.ted.com/playlists/253/11_ted_talks_by_brilliant_wome

Do not get me started on the science kits available for girls either....it's all lip glosses and perfume, because of course girls would be scared of real experiments...fucks sake.

Project M C Fucking Squared. I was so excited when I first heard about it. Then I saw the adverts. Even DD (loves dolls as well as dinosaurs) shouts at the screen

I despair. Who in their right mind thinks that girls will only engage if they can daub glitter on the subject?

i have managed to get something off to HR expressing how offensive I find the whole thing. Have also gotten a few colleagues to do the same.
Will be interested to see what, if any response i get.

Cant look at the FB or twitter account at the moment as firewalled.

I've told my daughter I will be very disappointed if she only goes in to science because of glittery shit. (I'm a third generation scientist, all the women and most of the men in my direct line are scientists.)

She is 18 months old so just shouted "cat" and toddled off, but I like to think she understood.

I'm off to add "Ada Twist, Scientist" to my Amazon basket.

That's great No1 I am fascinated to see what response you get!

It sounds very similar to the "Science: It's a girl thing!" furore in 2012.

You'd think anyone trying to get more girls into stem would know how badly that ludicrous 'science - its a girl thing' video went down. This is the same sort of patronising idiocy.

The idea that a career in STEM requires a lab coat is a bit of an old-fashioned cliche too, isn't it?

That was an x-post!

well quite Errol. I am an engineer, I haven't worn a lab coat with any frequency since university. although as an engineer we don't get asked to wear lab coats much it's more the hard hat that apparently we never work without

Dear organisers.

There are many reasons girls do not enter STEM careers. These are mostly influenced by stereotypes about female abilities in sTEM and known sexism within the industry leading to women seeing it as a hostile environment. I would hope you would understand that, your project seems to think women themselves are at fault for low take up if sTEM careers. You seem to think they're not interested because they don't get to wear glittery lab coats. Is this the message you were hoping to give young girls? Do you think they need they need patronising and luring in to sTEM careers?

That's fucking outrageous. I am fuming!

I like the concept of glitter tracking as an example of radioactive contamination, though it's probably harder to clean up glitter than most isotopes!

If it's midlands, I'll come and talk about medical physics.

Off to tweet furiously...

Cagliostro have you actually watched project mc2? My dd loves it. The girls look like fairly typical teens but there's no girlyfying science. It's a pretty good program actually.

Have to admit I haven't watched the show! It was the dolls/adverts that wound me/DD up, so it put us off watching. I'll give it a go then :)

One question: when they say "decorating lab coats" does it anyway specify that they mean making them sparkly/pink/more girly or are we just assuming that?

An event I was part of had a workshop where we did printing and painting on sweatshirts, but it was with political symbols, slogans, designs etc. There was nothing sparkly or glittery about it and had you assumed it was a fluffy waste of time you would have got the wrong end of the stick entirely. Did anyone check before the rage descended?

Soup - I'm a chemist and haven't worn a lab coat since I was an undergrad. Ok, so I work in silico , and do produce some very pretty molecular graphics and nicely decorated sequence annotations....

Caglio, definitely worth trying. I can't fault it though I haven't seen the advertising (advertisers frequently misrepresent shows so they look the way they think people want them to be).

Notever - whether prettifying or not, decorating labcoats seems like a complete and utter waste of time and money, nothing whatever to do with STEM or workplace equality.

Fuck me

Notever as far as I can tell from OPs posts no it doesn't specify, however a few of us have been on the organiser's Twitter feed and they have photos of girls on their days decorating labcoats with sharpies, fabric paints and glitter glue.

It's the products they're selling really Butthole it's all make up cases and such. Nothing like what I'd heard the show was about so it got me all grumbly. But if the show is decent then I'll try and separate the two in my head :o

(sorry for derailing thread)

Their Twitter feed even contains the patronising 'did you know cooking is science?' 🙄🙄🙄🙄