Giving Engineering the Benefits of Females

Excellent article in the Dallas Morning News this morning by Avi Selk - Science in their Sights.  The article profiles the "Girls of Technology" at the Singley Academy in Irving, Texas.

From the article:

"Females think differently,” Barton said. “Girls don’t need foo-foo aesthetics. But they need color and labs that will appeal to them instead of walking into a cave. The guys get wrapped up in the technical side. ‘How are we going to make this work?’ Girls tend to respond to things they see changing the world around them.”

That’s why Lesly wants to make robots. She imagines them rolling across Mars or helping legless people walk.

For Barton, it’s as much about giving women the benefit of science as it is about giving science the benefit of women. Sometimes she sees a group of boys come up with a complex plan to solve a task. “‘Let’s do this, do this, do this, do something else.’ And one of the girls reaches over and says, ‘if we just do these two steps, we’ll get this accomplished.’”