Katrina Schwartz

It’s a common refrain that there aren’t enough women in jobs that require math and science skills like engineering and computer science. Though more programs are cropping up geared towards girls involved in science through camps, rocketry clubs or with more focused courses on STEM subjects, the gender imbalance is still striking.

The discrepancy became all-too apparent to Debbie Sterling, a budding inventor who was one of the only girls in her engineering courses at Stanford. So she came up with an idea to encourage more girls in  is why she’s spent the last several years developing GoldieBlox, a toy focused on developing spatial skills in girls.

“I just think there need to be more options, more role models, more career paths for girls to see and that’s what I’m trying to do with GoldieBlox,” Sterling said.

Sterling discovered her interest in engineering almost by accident — a math teacher suggested she take a course when she got to college — and she wonders if girls would choose science careers if they were exposed to basic engineering and physics concepts earlier in life.

Research shows that building toys like Legos or Erector Sets are good for building spatial skills, but those typically fall under the stereotype of toys for boys. After visiting the toy store and experiencing what she called “the pink explosion isle for girls” Sterling decided she needed to build an engineering toy that would appeal to girls.

GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine is a construction kit with pieces that clip into a board to make a simple belt drive. The set comes with a story that tells of a girl engineer named Goldie who wants to build a spinning machine so all her friends can spin together. She takes apart a jewelry box to learn about the spinning mechanism and then builds her own.

[RELATED READING: Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick?]

“My ‘ah ha’ moment was that instead of a construction toy only, which is spatial skills and object play, I would combine spatial skills with verbal, so I would have the construction toy plus the book,” Sterling said. “By introducing the story of Goldie and these characters, and building for a reason, it gave girls the context they were craving and the narrative behind the play that was meaningful to them.”

She came up with the idea of her hybrid story-building toy by observing that girls prefer narrative-based play. She hoped she could draw girls in with a story and after directing them to follow along with Goldie as she builds, they’d get comfortable tinkering with the construction kit. Once they’re comfortable with the parts and how they work, the hope is that they begin to design their own machines.

“Some modeling of a cool, young girl engineer could be useful if the girl playing can see a path from where she is to where the cool, functioning engineer is,” said Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She said the connection between the toy and engineering needs to be clear and that the hands on-skills girls learn at young ages need to be continual reinforcement for the effects to last.

Goldie can be a role model to younger girls, while the inventor herself can model what a successful female engineer looks like to older girls. “She’s not the kid genius,” Sterling said describing Goldie. “She’s well liked; she’s fun; she’s quirky; she’s a little messy. I guess that is a bit like me.”

Sterling said in its early days the toy has been very popular with engineering parents. “It touched my heart that it was a mechanical toy that was targeted towards young girls,” said Martin Miller, an engineer who pre-ordered GoldieBlox for his six-year-old daughter Kaitlin when the toy appeared on Kickstarter. “That’s unusual and I felt that was perfect for my little daughter.” Kaitlin has two older brothers and Miller considers a tomboy, so he thought she’d like a building toy. She has also already begun to play with the characters off the board, imagining scenes for Goldie and her friends.

Sterling hoped her toy would inspire creative play and was also aware of research like Carol Dweck’s that shows kids need to learn to struggle with difficult concepts so they know how to tackle setbacks in the future.

“From a very young age I would start stressing the fun and interestingness of difficult tasks,” Dweck said. “When something is easy I’d say, ‘oh that’s boring, that’s a waste of time.’”

[RELATED READING: How to Foster Grit, Tenacity and Perseverance: An Educator's Guide]

In the first draft of the story, Sterling had Goldie build a machine that didn’t work. But when Sterling tested the story line, girls and their parents got so frustrated that the machine didn’t work that they refused to turn the page and continue. So Sterling softened the failure.

“I have a moment where Goldie is perplexed,” she said. “So I don’t set anyone up for failure, but I show that she’s confused and she doesn’t know the answers and she goes through a series of funny moments where she tries a bunch of things until she finally works it out.”

That strategy is in line with Dweck’s research on how to keep kids striving for challenging tasks. “If you have little failures along the way and have them understand that’s part of learning, part of building and that you can actually derive useful information about what to do next — that’s really useful,” Dweck said.

Some specialty toy stores are already stocking GoldieBlox after the Kickstarter campaign Sterling launched to fund manufacturing went viral and more than doubled its goal. “From the very beginning I knew I wanted this girl character sitting on the shelf next to Bob the Builder and Thomas the Train,” Sterling said.

The game costs $29.99 and the three additional story lines and accompanying kits that Sterling is working on will likely have similar price tags.

Sterling wants the toy to be inclusive, unlike her experiences in engineering classes at Stanford, where most of her professors were men and she often felt her ideas were discounted. “I want everybody to get to have fun with engineering and I think that by doing it in this very accessible way that no one has to feel like they don’t belong,” she said.

Flickr: Woodleywonderworks

How to praise kids: It’s a hot topic for many parents and educators. A lot of the conversation around it has stemmed from studies by Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford who has been researching this specific topic for many years.

“My research shows that praise for intelligence or ability backfires,” said Dweck, who co-authored a seminal research paper on the effects of praise on motivation and performance. “What we’ve shown is that when you praise someone, say, ‘You’re smart at this,’ the next time they struggle, they think they’re not. It’s really about praising the process they engage in, not how smart they are or how good they are at it, but taking on difficulty, trying many different strategies, sticking to it and achieving over time.”

But what some might not know is that this paradox is strongest for girls.

Dweck’s research, which focuses on what makes people seek challenging tasks, persist through difficulty and do well over time, has shown that many girls believe their abilities are fixed, that individuals are born with gifts and can’t change. Her research finds that when girls think this way, they often give up, rather than persisting through difficulties. They don’t think they possess the ability to improve, and nowhere is the phenomenon stronger than in math.

“Of all the subjects on earth, people think math is the most fixed,” Dweck said. “It’s a gift, you either have it or you don’t. And that it’s most indicative of your intelligence.” This attitude presents an especially sticky problem to educators working to boost girls’ interest and passion for science, technology, engineering and math – STEM subjects. For many boys, believing math is a fixed ability doesn’t hamper achievement — they just assume they have it, Dweck said. But girls don’t seem to possess that same confidence, and in their efforts to achieve perfection, Dweck’s research shows they shy away from subjects where they might fail.

[RELATED READING: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype]

“We have research showing that women who believe math is an acquired set of skills, not a gift you have or don’t have, fare very well,” Dweck said. “Even when they have a period of difficulty and even when they’re in an environment that they say is full of negative stereotyping.” This research suggests parents and educators should rethink what implicit and explicit messages are being sent to young girls about achievement.

If adults emphasize that all skills are learned through a process of engagement, value challenge and praise efforts to supersede frustration rather than only showing excitement over the right answer, girls will be show resilience. It also might help to provide a roadmap to correct the gender imbalance that already exists in fields requiring math and science, jobs that often involve setbacks, “failing,” and overcoming challenges.

Dweck has found that socialization and beliefs about learning ability are developed at early ages. “Mother’s praise to their babies, one to three years of age, predicts that child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” Dweck said. “It doesn’t mean it is set in stone, but it means that kind of value system — what you’re praising, what you say is important — it’s sinking in. And the kids who are getting this process praise, strategy and taking on hard things and sticking to them, those are the kids who want the challenge.”

Dweck understands it isn’t easy to praise process and emphasize the fun in challenging situations. Kids like direct praise, but to Dweck lauding achievement is like feeding them junk food – it’s bad for them.

[RELATED READING: How Important is Grit in Student Achievement?]

An implicit argument here is that failure in small doses is good. Dweck’s not the first person to make that argument; advocates of game-based learning say one of its strongest attributes lies in a player’s ability to fail and start over without being stigmatized. Students learn as they go, getting better each time they attempt a task in the game. But the current education system leaves little room for failure, and consequently anxious parents often don’t tolerate small setbacks either.

“If you have little failures along the way and have them understand that’s part of learning, and that you can actually derive useful information about what to do next, that’s really useful,” Dweck said.

She believes families should sit around the dinner table discussing the day’s struggles and new strategies for attacking the problem. In life no one can be perfect, and learning to view little failures as learning experiences, or opportunities to grow could be the most valuable lesson of all.

Flickr:Bunchesandbits

“The struggle with writing is over.”

That message, written on a Post-It note and affixed to his computer, brings the novelist Philip Roth great relief and contentment these days, according to a profile published earlier this week in the New York Times. At the age of 79, the author of more than 31 acclaimed books says he is finished with writing, and he couldn’t be happier. “I look at that note every morning,” he told Times reporter Charles McGrath, “and it gives me such strength.”

Fans of Roth’s books—which include Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral—may be surprised to learn that he regarded writing as a struggle at all.

His words flowed so easily on the page, and his books arrived with such frequency in the stores: at times, close to one every year. But behind that proficiency and productivity was arduous, unrelenting work. Roth told his interviewer that he’d enjoyed spending time with friends at his house in Connecticut this past summer: “In the old days I couldn’t have people in the house all the time. When they came for the weekend, I couldn’t get out to write.”

Americans have a complicated relationship with this kind of relentless striving. We extol the virtues of hard work even as we idolize the “natural,” the star who effortlessly achieves, who wins the race without breaking a sweat. The writer Malcolm Gladwell has called this tendency “the naturalness bias,” and notes that we bring it to bear on individuals ranging from athletes to artists to “gifted” children. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology last year, Harvard

psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Chia-Jung Tsay applied a scientific lens to the phenomenon, gathering a group of professional musicians as subjects. The experimenters first asked the musicians their opinion on the source of musical achievement: Was “effortful” training more important, they inquired, or innate ability? The former, the musicians replied, expressing “the strong belief that strivers will achieve over naturals.”

Banaji and Tsay then described two pianists, equal in achievement but different in their paths to success: one was a natural, showing early evidence of high innate ability; the other was a striver, exhibiting early evidence of high motivation and perseverance. The investigators played an audio clip of each pianist performing, and asked the musicians for their judgments. Despite their stated belief in the value of effort, the naturalness bias won out: the musicians rated the “natural” performer as more talented, more likely to succeed, and more hirable than the striver. (In fact, the clips were played by the same performer, pianist Gwhyneth Chen.)

Research by another psychologist, Carol Dweck of Stanford University, has shown that children and adults who believe in the power of effort to overcome challenges (what she calls a “growth mindset”) are more resilient and ultimately more successful than those who are convinced that ability is innate (the “fixed mindset”). Banaji and Tsay’s experiment suggests that our faith in inborn talent “may operate less than consciously,” leading us to make “suboptimal choices and evaluations”—because, as volumes of research show, elite performance really is the product of striving.

Take it from Philip Roth, who’s spent a lifetime laboring to write perfect sentences. Or from Carol Dweck, who puts it more prosaically: “Even geniuses work hard.”

Flickr:WoodleyWonderworks

Do girls need special attention when it comes to science, math, and technology topics? In response to last week’s article about Techbridge, the after-school science program specifically geared to girls, some readers strongly refuted the notion that girls need the extra nudge.

“‘Steering’ something suggests directing it in a path it would not normally, of its own inclination, go!” wrote reader Julian Penrod. “The very title connotes a program to give an impression of female overall interest in the hard sciences, even though it wouldn’t necessarily, on its own, exist. In other words, a fraud.”

The reader raises a subtle but important issue — but it goes much deeper than that. According to Claude Steele, author of Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, it’s not that girls aren’t necessarily interested in science and math, it’s whether they’re discouraged from following their interests because of the persistent stereotype that girls aren’t good at that sort of thing.

Steele has examined this very phenomenon closely for years and has identified it as a stereotype threat. The issue is much more complex than the very basic tendencies of what naturally interests either gender. Steele pinpoints the problem to what happens after girls follow their interests in science and math studies, when inevitable obstacles come up.

“When you perform in science and math… in the larger society you’re stereotyped as not being good at it,” Steele says of girls. “You experience a little frustration, you say, ‘Am I confirming that stereotype and am I going to be seen to confirm that stereotype? Am I going to have to live under this pressure for the rest of my life if I choose this as a career?’ So there’s a pressure coming just from those stereotypes that discourages women from engaging in those fields and, and staying in those fields even when their skills and abilities are A-plus. So that’s an extra burden.”

Steele says it’s a subtle but crucial mindset that can make the difference between a girl choosing to go into a STEM field — or trying harder on a math or science test — and choosing not to.

Stanford researcher Carol Dweck, who wrote Is Math a Gift? Beliefs That Put Females at Risk, takes it one step further. Dweck has researched the topic of stereotypes, natural aptitude, and how praising effort or intelligence can be harmful, and she’s come up with a thought-provoking conclusion.

“One of the most damaging aspects of the ‘gift’ mentality is that it makes us think we can know in advance who has the gift. This, I believe, is what makes us try to identify groups who have it and groups who don’t—as in ‘boys have it and girls don’t,’” Dweck writes. “Can anyone say for sure that there isn’t some gift that makes males better at math and science? What we can say is that many females have all the ability they need for successful careers in math-related and scientific fields and that the idea of the ‘gift-that-girls-don’t-have’ is likely to be a key part of what’s keeping them from pursuing those careers.”

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has also researched the phenomenon and says these detrimental stereotypes are enmeshed in our culture. “It’s pervasive in our cultural narrative,” he said at the Innovative Learning Conference. “‘I’m not this kind of learner or that kind of learner. I’m good at words, but not math.’… It’s a theory about how the world works.”

Societies without these stereotypes don’t impose the same burden, Steele says, and as a result, there are a great deal more women engaging in science and math-based fields. “Poland, India, parts of Asia, where there are many more women participating in math and STEM fields, the stereotype is much weaker. The girls going into those fields don’t experience the same pressure they do in a society like ours where relatively few women participate in these fields. That strengthens the stereotype and the pressure they can feel.”

Where do these stereotypes come from? Cues from the environment that suggest there aren’t many women in this field, Steele says. In short, a self-fulfilling prophecy. “The pictures on the wall don’t show many women as famous mathematicians,” Steele says. “Examples used in math classes are more boy-oriented than girl-oriented.”

THE FIX

It all comes down to our understanding (and thus, kids’ understanding) that it’s not about a fixed set of abilities, but about what can be learned. Dweck observed in her study that, by the end of eighth grade, “there is a considerable gap between females and males in their math grades— but only for those students who believed that intellectual skills are a gift. When we look at students who believed that intellectual ability could be expanded, the gap is almost gone.”

If we as a society understand that ability is expandable and incrementable, and subject to deliberate practice, the impact of being stereotyped can be dramatically reduced, Steele adds. Schools should practice this strategy, and parents should create an atmosphere at home that learning math and science can be as challenging for girls as for boys — and that the fun lives in solving the challenge.

At Techbridge, the after-school science and math program for girls, founder Linda Kekellis says the exposure to women role models has gone a long way in making careers in STEM fields a real possibility for students. She says more than 95 percent of girls believe engineering is a good career choice for women.

“We’ve tracked back to some of our girls who have graduated from Techbridge and have found that a large percentage of them are studying science and engineering in college and are planning to have careers in those fields,” she says.