I’ve been looking into women’s engineering groups on college campuses when I came across STEMinist at New York University. They have a beautiful Tumblr site and Facebook group.
Upon doing some additional research I found another group called STEMinist that had been around for years. My first thought was, as someone who is embedded in science and engineering, why hadn’t it ever occurred to me that this was a term?
There has historically been a very strong - sometimes negative - association to being called a feminist. To some it meant being very vocal and aggressive, anti men and anti bras to name just a few. The term has now evolved to a woman who is empowered to make her own decisions. An extension of that definition would mean that a STEMinist is a woman engineer or scientist who is empowered. Too much to handle?
As Angela Cleveland stated in Bugged by a Fixed Mindset about Science, women have been socially programmed to reject any notion of being associated with science. An immediate response can be “I’m not a nerd or a tomboy! I’m fun and like to do things other than study.” It’s time to deprogram ourselves and bring the humanistic side to STEM. We can program an app and then go dancing. We can shun flannel and lab coats in exchange for colorful clothes and heels.
A perfect example of this is this portrait of women scientists through TED Fellows. Would love to see the title “Meet 12 Badass Scientists…Who Also Happen to be Women” one day be the norm and not the exception.