Bi-Weekly Round Up 22 June

#WomenInSTEM
 
Mattel is releasing a new Game Developer Barbie doll: with a silver headset, a laptop and some cool glasses. This comes after the controversy of last year where the Computer Engineer Barbie book showed Barbie needing to ask a boy to help her.

In the 1950’s when aerospace engineers needed to calculate something, they turned to computers - the women who did all the calculations by hand before there were machines available to do that. However, because it was mostly women who were computers, programming was looked down upon and nearly prevented the exploration of space.
 
17 year-old Shania Clifford was the first girl to win the statewide masonry contest, but the boy in third place is going to take her place in the national competition instead
 
STEM Solutions
 
Women are used to being objectified by society, but one place I wouldn’t expect to see it is in a math textbook. This article describes how one textbook showed a sketch of a nude woman lying down facing to illustrate the negative curvature - of her hip, among other sexist comments. It’s disheartening to see how blatant sexism could be, even from a textbook that is supposed to encourage girls to study the subject.
 
The CIHR, Canada’s main biomedical funding organization released last week that female scientists are less likely to receive funding grants. Whether that is due to less women applying or systemic bias is unclear, but they are taking a closer look.
 
Check out these rad women in STEM!

Bozoma Saint John, the Head of Global Consumer Marketing for Apple Music, spoke at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference, and Twitter went wild. People were very excited to see a woman of color on stage representing Apple on the global stage, and she truly stole the show.
 
You may have heard of Debbie Sterling, the engineer from Stanford who founded GoldieBlox, a line of engineer toys for girls. She has since disrupted the toy industry and the “pink aisle”, and is now creating an app specifically designed to help girls learn to code. 
 
Bonus this week!

This article from BuzzFeed showed just how gross our phones are, complete with graphic pictures of petri dishes full of bacteria. Gross! What I loved about the article was that the experiments were carried out by a woman and a female researcher. Now go sanitize your phones!
 
Have a great week!

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