By Thea Voutiritsas
There has been a recent effort from multiple major companies to promote women in STEM, and while the idea is great, the execution has been poor. As we’ve seen from EDF’s #prettycurious campaign, making science cutesy doesn’t equal making it accessible. IBM tweeted this video over the weekend along with
“Calling all #womenintech! Join the #HackAHairDryer experiment to reengineer what matters in #science.”
Despite their good intentions, IBM’s campaign implies that science will be best marketed to women through beauty products. Here’s the thing: women don’t need to be tricked into doing science. If we want to disassemble stigmas as math and science as unfeminine, we have to stop equating femininity to beauty. We don’t need to “dress up” science, but maybe we can dress down our beauty-centered expectations of femininity.