This summer, a one-minute video titled “Science: It’s a Girl Thing!” was created and posted on a European Commission website as part of a campaign to attract more women to the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The video features flashes of makeup interspersed with laboratory equipment: a tube of lipstick merges into a shot of a test tube, a cloud of blush fades into steaming beakers… you get the idea. Combined with that are the shots of high-heeled tween girls striking poses intermittently throughout the clip. Needless to say, the video was “met with a collective icy stare, and quickly taken down.”
Some female Dartmouth PhD students doing climate research in Greenland have created a short video in response to this criticized E.C. video. The students, who are fellows in Dartmouth’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program in polar environmental change, decided to make a video that is both tongue-in-cheek and an authentic picture of female scientists working in the field. Their video is called “Science in Greenland: It’s a Girl Thing.”
The only makeup in their video is a shot of a Dartmouth student putting on chapstick in a rearview mirror; instead these girls decided to garner interest in science by showing the real day-to-day field work they’re doing in Greenland, which involves everything from digging in the dirt and snow to operating some pretty heavy machinery! Go them!
You can view both videos in the original Dartmouth Now article here!