Science, a people thing

On friday, the European Commission released a teaser video for its new campaign to recruit young women into science. As their press release says, they were concerned that stereotypical images of science were putting girls off studying the subject and wanted to show science as “a girl thing”.

Shall we just say they didn’t handle it very well? See, for example, coverage of outrage at Wired UK, the Telegraph, Nature, the Washington Post and New Statesman. It’s hard to describe how bad this is. Watch it for yourself:

As many people pointed out, they simply replaced some stereotypes about science with a few other more, rather painful ones, surrounding gender. I think they’re still working from a rather narrow view of science too and this is annoying because both “science” and “girl” are categories that should be kept open for interpretation. Science isn’t a girl thing. Or a boy thing. Or a white thing. Or a posh thing. Or an old people thing. Or an atheist thing. Or a geek thing. At it’s best, as Deb Blum says, science is a people thing.

A short video trying to present the whole of science to all European young women was always doomed to crapness. Rather than getting PR people to sit in a room and guess what girls think is cool (or even asking a few thousand and then coming up with a bland composite / generalised idea) the EU should treat young people and scientists as individuals and invite groups of them to talk to each other. As I’ve argued before, the I’m a Scientist project is a great example of this, showing a broad range of everyday researchers and the day to day frustrations and excitements of scientific life. I also like the way I’m a Scientist aims to give some degree of agency to young people. Just because science education is about sharing the expertise of previous generations with the next doesn’t mean kids have to be simply spoken down to. Science might be a matter of standing on the shoulders of giants, but that doesn’t mean we can’t discuss which giants’ work we want to build on, or know where we’re going to take any of this.

So, if you feel the need to wash your eyes out with soap after watching the science girl thing vid, try watching these instead. See how young people can be the people doing science, communicating it to others and challenging sci/ tech policy:

1. How a 15 year old became involved in cancer research (winner of the 2011 Google Science Fair).
2. Three girls get excited by the Leidenfrost effect (winner of the 2010 IoP Best SciCast Physics film).
3. An 11 year old’s short film about shale gas (winner of a “Have Your Say on Sustainability” contest, she then went to Brussells to address MEPs on the topic).

The lazy sexism of the science girl thing video was annoying, but really I filed it with my (depressingly large) set of examples of crass science communication projects which patronise young people. Stop trying to find ways to repackage science and instead invite people to be part of it. Let them find out what they think is inspiring for themselves. If it would relinquish some control, grown up science might even learn something from young people.