Having women involved in early product development also helps ensure that products are designed with women consumers in mind—smartphones sized for women’s hands, artificial hearts that fit into women’s chest cavities, health apps that track menstruation, and virtual assistants that direct questions about sexual assault to appropriate resources. Design failures in all of those areas have been linked to male-dominated development teams. So ensuring equal opportunities for women in STEM isn’t just good for women, it’s also good for business.
After hearing his daughters’ explanations for their lack of interest in STEM careers, Qusi started thinking about how to create a better environment for female engineers. “It should be our goal and duty to make a place for women in engineering,” he decided. Qusi sees the problem as a pipeline issue: change education and culture from an early age, and that could change girls’ career paths. As a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Qusi has been increasing public awareness of how engineering, computing, and technology advance the public good, and of the importance of getting girls interested in science and technology to bring new contributors into the field. He’s also become a women’s mentor and an advocate for bringing women engineers into schools to share their experiences.
Several other dads of daughters have responded to Qusi’s plea by focusing even earlier in the pipeline. These dads have realized that welcoming girls into STEM requires a gender-bending cultural shift that empowers young girls to imagine themselves as engineers, mathematicians, techies, and scientists—as well as opens young boys up to the idea that STEM classes and careers are for everyone. Two dads have found creative ways to pique girls’ interest after learning from their daughters that nothing empowers girls quite like a girl superhero.
STEAMTeam 5
For Greg Helmstetter, becoming a dad was both a joyful and an unsettling event. When his daughter, Kamea, was born, Greg found himself wondering about the world she was facing. In imagining what she might grow up to be, he couldn’t help but worry about the power of technology to dictate job requirements or eliminate jobs entirely. He decided that teaching Kamea STEM skills would be the best insurance against an uncertain future.
This was an impressive goal for a dad who’s neither a scientist nor an engineer. Greg was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who moved to Arizona to become a partner in Monsoon Strategy, a business consulting firm. But even as a businessman, Greg decided that it was critical to surround his daughter with math, science, and technology. “Not to try to force her into these fields,” he explains, “but to give her the widest range of options possible.” Greg felt personally responsible for doing this well because he and his wife were homeschooling their daughter. “It’s on us if she’s getting taught well,” he says, which pushed him to think more creatively about how to get her interested in STEM skills.
Despite the best of intentions, Greg’s plan hit a roadblock. As he looked around at toys, children’s books, and TV programs, he found nothing depicting girls who were excited about using science, math, and technology. So Greg began inventing his own games and stories—often with his daughter’s Barbie dolls—to inject STEM concepts into playtime. Suddenly, Kamea’s Barbies weren’t just changing outfits, they were devising plans to catch ninja spies or launching a company to manufacture electric cars. In one of Greg’s stories, the Barbie dolls were the executives of a dog food factory and they used their profit from selling Mega Blok dog food to fund an animal shelter. Greg admits that at first, he was mostly just finding ways to make doll time more tolerable for himself, but he realized that he could use his stories to disrupt gender stereotypes and inject values.
Greg’s stories initially focused on his own entrepreneurial skills, but doll time soon became STEM-training time. Before long, the Barbie dolls were using technology, science, and math skills like superpowers to solve problems, rescue animals, and invent new products. Word of Greg’s girl-powered lessons soon spread through the playground network. Other parents of daughters started asking Greg where they could get copies of his stories. Greg saw a gaping hole that needed to be filled to enable young girls to see themselves as future scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and techies.
Greg enlisted the help of his business partner, Pamela Metivier, to co-found a publishing branch of their company to create children’s books that empower girls to become the next generation of STEAM leaders. They expanded Greg’s stories into an all-star cast of five girls, each with her own skillset and personality, with the goal of producing a five-book series. What young girl could resist a book series called STEAMTeam 5, in which ordinary girls use extraordinary STEAM skills to solve mysteries, fix problems, and make the world a better place?
The STEAMTeam girls are so hip—and so super-skilled—that they’re sure to inspire. There’s Sandia Scientist, who goes surfing with her dog Phyto, and who loves chemistry, biology, astronomy, quantum physics, and forensics. She’s always asking questions, doing experiments, and solving mysteries. There’s Treeka Technologist, who’s been programming and taking things apart since she was four, and who enjoys cryptology, puzzles, lock picking, and meditation. When she was little, she reprogrammed her talking teddy bear to respond “good idea, Treeks” to everything she says. They’re joined by Evelyn Engineer, who loves inventing and tinkering with cars, planes, and robots, and who can design a pretty impressive booby-trap. Ariana Artist is the team’s creative force, who loves drawing, sculpting, 3D animation, and making electronic music. Mattie Mathematician rounds out the team with her passion for numbers and logic.
While all the team members have unique super-skills, Greg made sure that the girls aren’t depicted as natural geniuses. The stories show how the girls developed their skills through hard work over time, and how it takes teamwork to solve problems. The books aren’t filled with explicit math and science lessons, but with entertaining stories about female role models to get girls excited about using STEAM skills. “They go on adventures and do fun things,” Greg explains, “and they happen to use STEAM skills because they’re good at them, and they’re good at them because they have passion.”
While Greg definitely wants to reach young girls who need to see themselves reflected in tech-centered stories, he also wants his books in the hands of boys, who need to see girls in tech roles from an early age. Greg’s all about promoting female empowerment, but he knows that men are still gatekeepers, so he wants just as many boys reading his books as girls.
Greg’s daughter Kamea still serves as “a focus group of one” to give feedback on his stories. Greg hopes that STEAMTeam 5 will inspire the next generation of girls to follow their passions in math, science, and technology. “STEAMTeam 5 is much more than just a book,” Greg explains, “it’s a movement designed to get girls interested in STEM/STEAM from a very early age, and to keep them interested.”
Ella the Engineer
Like Greg Helmstetter, New York native Anthony Onesto’s inspiration for changing the male-dominated tech culture came from his two daughters, Ella and Nicolette. Anthony was the Director of Talent Development for the digital marketing and consulting company Razorfish. While watching his daughters, he discovered a gap in the interest level that girls and boys have in technology. That prompted him to look around his own tech company, and he was startled to realize that only ten of the eight hundred coders were women. “That was my ‘what now’ moment,” he says. “How do we get more girls to get excited about coding?”
Anthony checked out the TV shows and media that his daughters watched, and just like Greg, he found an absence of role models depicting females in computer science and technology. This imbalance starts ingraining stereotypes at a very young age. When girls are asked to draw a scientist or someone who’s good at math, they’re more likely to draw a man than a woman. In talking with female engineers, Anthony heard the same message—no role models, no mentors, nobody to emulate. That’s when he had his “Ally McBeal moment.” He remembered that when Ally showed up as a clever and quirky attorney