The two girls stand, smiling. Clad in their traditional green uniforms, their arms are full with boxes of Thin Mints and other assorted cookies.
The message of these two Girl Scouts on a billboard hacking their sweet treats? Simple — resistance is futile.
But don’t discount these tribes of capitalistic kids as only being interested in singing “Kumbaya” and making sit-upons. The Girl Scouts of America have launched an ad campaign highlighting the importance of keeping younger women interested in science and technology.
Perhaps you’ve seen the ads for “Girls Go Tech,” one of which features a young girl asking her father why the sky is blue. He replies with the sweet, but uninformative response — “To match your pretty eyes.”
She isn’t fazed and replies with the technical answer, that nitrogen and other elements are deflected by light, thus creating the color blue. She tells him her mother taught her this.
A bit overexaggerated, but smart. As the National Science Foundation reports that while women make up 46 percent of the workplace but only 25 percent of the technology workforce and 10 percent of those top jobs, it’s time someone worked to pique girls’ interests while they’re young.
Scouting presents girls with a nonthreatening way to learn about technology and science. Oftentimes classrooms are hostile places for women because professors or teachers inherently show preference to men. Informal social groups such as scouting allow girls to meet with their classmates and peers outside of a structured school setting. Most Scout leaders are female, thus presenting positive same-sex rolemodels for young girls.
By integrating technology into this laid-back environment, girls learn it is not only necessary for success, but also fun to use. They can take these scouting lessons back to the classroom with increased confidence, making female students a more active part of the learning process.
To be fair, attitudes to women in science have improved. Biology and chemistry are no longer seen as “boys only” clubs. But without encouraging girls to seek out technology and science, we passively allow them to be complacent to the issue.
How can you encourage the young girls in your life to be more tech and science-savvy? Help them set up e-mail accounts to converse with their friends. Take them to museums. Help them research homework on the Internet and in digital databases. Bring them to work or school with you to show them technology used in everyday life. Find out what technology is used to cook and distribute those infamous cookies.
The possibilities are endless, yet simple. If you seriously want to affect young girls’ impressions of technology, do it little by little everyday.
So don’t just buy cookies from your neighborhood Girl Scout, engage her in conversation about how she used technology today. Little by little, we can show young females that resistance to technology, as well as yummy cookies, is futile.