Getting girls in STEM & the dangers of forgetting that Science is Art - someone made it up

Abstract

Encouraging girls to participate in STEM is a hot topic that has captured the concern of the world’s academic, business and scientific communities. The intention is noble, however the strategies being deployed are reinforcing the very bias society seeks to eliminate. If we wish to advance our evolutionary journey as a species, a shift from “feeling sorry for disadvantaged girls” to “fearing STEM without girls’ reformation” is imperative. This piece discusses the rise to an initiative to redesign culture: Girlapproved. Author/Artist Bio Heidi Danglemaier is an inventor + designer + scientist. She is an expert at creating “Tipping Points” first to market innovations that become global and mass-market category leaders. Heidi’s products generated billions in revenues for the world’s biggest corporations. She has activated exponential growth in over 20 industries including the first video games for girls, the first enterprise social media software, financial tools, and retail design, to beauty products, denim, and even tampons. Her work has been celebrated by dozens of publications as wide reaching as New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Women’s Wear Daily to trade magazines IDSA , AIGA, ANA, IEEE, ARF, COMPUTER GAMING WORLD. Heidi has a BSc in Physics and a BSc in Computer Science from Western Washington University, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of British Columbia, and pursued her Phd in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Physics at Princeton. Heidi left academia because of her deeply-felt mission to reinvent a future worthy of humanity. In 2005 she made a radical change and started an initiative to reinvent the future of consumerism called Girlapproved, electing to work exclusively work with young female artists. “Team Girl” proved to be most rational, competitive, selfoptimizing move Heidi could make. The beginning of 2018 will mark the end of a 12 years of empirical experiments exploring a new frontier of economic and cultural potential and growth, as well as the untapped intellectual and creative potential of females. Heidi and her teams of girls have achieved results that business and scientific believed impossible. Together, they discovered a universal algorithm for forecasting market tipping points. They also proved that “gut feelings” and “women’s intuition” can be measured and applied, reforming intelligence as we know it. Finally, they pioneered a generalized extension to the scientific method to include this new information opening a frontier of universal truths and laws of nature. Starting December 2017, Heidi is opening the door of Girlapproved and sharing this research with the public, activating a global challenge to the foundations science, economics and cultural design the first intelligence movement pioneered by females. www.linkedin.com/in/girlapproved Camilla Hermann has the best training education could offer. She began at The Winsor School in Boston and then attended New York University where she received her BA from the Gallatin School for Individualized Study with honors. Driven by a desire to be of service, Camilla turned to international development. She co-founded GroundUp Global, an organization that worked with the Liberian refugee population in Ghana. In partnership with the Liberian Embassy in Ghana, UN, Ghana Refugee Board, and International Organization of Migration, Camilla assisted in the repatriation of 3500 Liberian refugees back to their home country. Her next humanitarian focus was wiping out epidemics building life-saving technology that increased contact tracing coverage of health workers during the 2014 Ebola epidemic. She secured partnerships with Google, The Liberian Government, WHO and Doctors Without Borders. Her work has been featured at the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference, the United Nations NGO Conference, and was selected as a semi-finalist for the Ashoka Changemaker Challenge. Collaborating with the most rigorous and impactful social institutions, Camillia soon realized that these organization had stopped working and were now part of the problems. Despite her This article is available in The STEAM Journal: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol3/iss1/10 accomplishments it was evident that the most important contribution she could make was challenging and reforming contemporary systems of social innovation at large. Camilla is a member of Generation Truth she has courage, conviction, and the strength to draw a line for justice. www.linkedin.com/in/camillafhermann Art credit: Maria Ianne, is an activist graphic designer in New York City who is a graduate of Marist College. Maria Ianne collaborated with Heidi Danglemaier to create Generation Truth art for this article.