With Girl Power and All That Jazzy STEM

"Daddy, we want to work on the car!"

"Sure, just don't scratch the paint and work on the bottom along the sides and and the tires only."

Thrilled, Beatrice and Bryce brought their play toolkit down to the driveway and got to work. Unfortunately, they did rub some of the tools against the side of our car, which I immediately got all Daddy Goat Gruff about.

Besides that, however, I proudly watched while they "worked" on the car, really thinking about the tools they chose to use and what they were doing, and discussing it with one another.

Until, of course, the thrill of discovery broke down into chase-around-the-car mayhem -- they are kids you know.

We've encouraged them since the earliest moment of awareness and learning to embrace science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, STEM skills as they're known. Unfortunately women only make up about half of the workforce in the U.S. economy today, less than 25% of them hold STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). That's a lot of untapped talent in the workforce today with many cultural and institutional reasons of why.

And if we want our children, girls especially, to be in the 60th-70th percentile and above in the world of work and STEM skills, then we've all got work to do.

Yesterday I listened to an NPR Planet Money episode titled When Women Stopped Coding and I was floored by what I heard. That before 1984, more computing pioneers were women. But post 1984, something changed: "the number of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged."

Boys will be boys will be encouraged to do techie things, but not girls, right?

I wrote a recruiting article last week for TalentCulture that focused on the importance of skilling up and company culture when recruiting in-demand tech talent and beyond. In it I cited a Fast Company article and recent research from the Center for Talent Innovation, U.S. women working in science, engineering, and tech fields are 45% more likely than their male peers to leave the industry within the year. This is due to male-dominated tech, biased performance evaluations and lack of women mentors. 

Quite disheartening for the Mama and I, being parents of two bright little girls who may go into tech someday. Oh, I’m not even going to comment on the egg-freezing benefit offered to Facebook and Apple female employees who want to delay motherhood either.

But if we can have anything to do about it, and thanks to shows like Doc McStuffins and Earth to Luna and others, and if the girls want to go into any of these fields, we can help them develop and thrive in a male-dominated tech world that they make their own, with girl power and all that jazzy STEM. 

In fact, I say we make a 21st century version of the 1980s classic Weird Science with nerdy girls dominating and objectifying boys.

No worries. Us boys can take the sting.