Vanessa Diaz and Girls Launch!

Hi, I am Vanessa Diaz collegiate assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech. I am the co director of the iLeap Lab and the co director of the Girls Launch! project. Girls Launch! is a multidimensional project that I have been working on for a few years here at Virginia Tech. It has two parts. On the one hand is a collaboration with the Center for Communicating Science. And through that aspect, we do an outreach program in which we take a female scientists to kindergarten classrooms as a way to, you know, incentivize girls in science. As well as to give the graduate students opportunities to practice science communication. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is that I have been able to collect data on the impact of these presentations, as well as study the development of gendered stereotypes around intelligence in children. So how and why is it that children start to see men as more likely to be scientists as opposed to women? One aspect that I want to focus on going forward is that I also want to see how much of an impact we're having on the boys. Right? In seeing, for them to see that girls can be scientists, right? I asked students in middle school to draw scientists. Right. So these were boys and girls in middle school. And the girls drew 50% of the scientists were male and 50% of the scientists that they drew were female. The boys drew 98% male scientist to other, 2% were other creatures, They were an, they were aliens, right? Boys in middle school would rather draw an animal as a scientist than a woman as a scientist, right? At least in my sample. I think the progress that we're doing in empowering girls is wonderful. But I think there's a whole other side that needs to be addressed as well.