Small Strokes Big Oaks

I’m a little late on this one, but I have a new post up at Teaching Tolerance about how to encourage girls to stay in STEM fields:

This might seem like a no-brainer, but one of the most important things we can help our girls realize is that being smart is nothing to be ashamed of. Dr. Carolyn Phillips, assistant computational scientist in the math and computer science division of Argonne, told the girls, “You want to be around smart people because smart people make you smarter.” In her keynote address, she cited studies that state that women are more likely to feel frustrated when they fail than men are. Men are much more likely to subscribe to Thomas Edison’s statement: “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Phillips encouraged the girls to persevere with the hard problems, saying, “You know you’re working on something good if you can’t solve it right way.” Science is all about failing; some of the best inventions and solutions to the most difficult problems have come from experimentation and subsequent failures.

Read the rest here!