The Future of Science is Female. Zara Stone
this later), but none approach coding from a beauty perspective. That’s where the Nailbot comes in.
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As a little girl, Pree always thought her career would be in politics. She was born in the South, in New Orleans. Her family moved to Madison, Mississippi, when she was nine years old. No matter where she lived, she’d plunk herself down in front of the TV whenever the debates were on, sitting as close as she could to the screen to take in everything.
One of her earliest memories is of watching the debates with her dad. He’d get so excited watching the various politicians speak. Her dad loved America, loved it with the type of passion that only an immigrant has. He’d emigrated to the US from India, during one of the many wars in the 1960s, to attend university and find a better, safer life.
America was everything he’d hoped for; he was hired as an electrical engineer by a great company, and Pree’s mom ran a bunch of successful franchises—everything from a Baskin-Robbins (Pree’s top tip: try the Gold Medal Ribbon flavor) to jewelry store chains. In this country, you can do anything, be anything, he told Pree. It’s the land of opportunity!
Maybe I’ll be a senator one day, she thought. Or even the president! At school she took speech and debate, working on her diction till all traces of her Southern accent were gone. She signed up for student council and organized the school’s philanthropic drive. Her favorite thing was getting people together, all working toward a bigger purpose. She craved the feeling of a task successfully completed. That feeling of achievement was addictive. In high school, she interned for the Mississippi Secretary of State, helping out on charity enforcement.
“I was fascinated by the political process,” she said. But Pree realized that being in charge wasn’t what drove her. “Whether you’re heading student council, running for president, or being an entrepreneur, it’s about having a vision of the future.”
Pree and her two elder sisters (and sometimes her little bro) helped out with her mom’s businesses; many nights, she’d scoop ice cream for the local kids and listen to their chatter. So many different people, so many different wants. The world was so big, and there were so many things she could do.
After high school, she studied history with a gender studies minor at Northwestern University. College life was awesome; she joined a sorority, made lifelong friends, and enjoyed feeling like an adult.
But Pree found that she couldn’t stay away from politics. In 2003, she volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign (spoiler: he lost), and when she graduated from college in 2004, she was hired by Campaign Corps, a program at Emily’s List that supports women that are running for office. For an entry-level graduate, the program worked a bit like Teach for America; after learning how to operate a campaign, Pree was sent to a congressional race in Arizona. She followed this with a stint in Washington DC, working for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, then headed by Nancy Pelosi. Next, she headed west to work on the California primary for governor. She was twenty-four years old.
Still unsure about what to do with her life, she applied to business school, hoping that would narrow it down. Maybe consulting? That would give her variety and a chance to keep affecting large groups of people. She applied to all the big-name firms…but no one would hire her. “I think that with my crazy energy and my crazy background, I wasn’t the best fit for them,” she said. She confused the companies; a history major with a background in political campaigns and ice cream who wanted to get into consulting? Frustrated, Pree worked on a new plan. She knew that she valued a high-energy workplace that operated at a fast pace. Maybe joining a startup?
In 2009, she was hired part-time by a San Francisco Bay Area startup that specialized in advancing LED light systems; they focused on connected technology and color-changing bulbs. She was the only woman on the team. But the world was changing around her. By the time she left, almost a fifth of the employees were women.
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The tech landscape was changing in other ways as well. In 2011, Debbie Stirling, a twenty-eight-year-old designer at a San Francisco branding firm, was inspired by a chat she’d had with her friends during brunch. They were reminiscing about the favorite toys they’d played with as kids when one woman complained that she’d had to borrow her brother’s Legos, as they were never bought for her. Debbie knew that feeling well. She’d grown up in Rhode Island with the idea that “engineering” was a nerdy and intimidating word. Her parents wanted her to be an actress. They bought her Barbie dolls, but no Legos. Engineering was just for boys, she thought. “I was so wrong!” Despite having no construction toys as a kid, with a teacher’s guidance, she’d turned to science, and graduated from Stanford University with a degree in engineering and product design. “I became obsessed with the idea of getting girls interested in STEM through toys,” she told reporters.
For the next nine months, after she finished work, she pored over research about how kids’ brains develop, and how the different genders learn. “My aha moment: realizing that combining storytelling with building was a way to get girls interested in STEM,” she said. She’d discovered that young boys have good spatial skills (one reason that they love Legos so much) whereas young girls have great verbal skills; they’re all about the characters and the stories.
Debbie named her company GoldieBlox, targeting five- to nine-year-olds with a book-and-build combo. The kit contained a construction set and a book, starring Goldie, a blond tween inventor who loved purple overalls and taking things apart.
Whenever Goldie had a problem, she built a machine to fix it. The set let kids build that too, unknowingly learning basic engineering principles as they followed her adventures. Debbie’s color palette was light, fresh, and fun—there is pink in there, but it hasn’t been “pinkwashed.” After Goldie, she introduced Ruby Rails, an African American coding whiz.
Excited with her design, she brought her prototype to the New York Toy Fair, the best-known toy fair in America. No one liked it. “I was told that toy patterns were innate—girls liked playing with dolls and boys liked building,” she said. They told her it was a noble cause, but it would never go mainstream. She disagreed. “I knew these were outdated stereotypes that needed to change.”
She wasn’t going to quit now; she believed so much in the project that she’d spent her life savings on it. So she turned to Kickstarter. “GoldieBlox is to inspire girls the way Legos and Erector sets have inspired boys to develop an early interest and skill set in engineering,” she wrote. “It’s time to motivate our girls to help build our future.”
She offered rewards to people who contributed, including a yellow T-shirt that read “more than just a princess,” with the O replaced by a machine cog. Her video went viral, proving what she already knew; kids were crying out for this. In 2014, GoldieBlox’s ad aired during the Super Bowl, and, in 2019, the company was valued at more than forty million dollars. Debbie wasn’t the only female entrepreneur making waves.
In 2014, engineer Sara Chipps and fashion guru Brooke Moreland decided to team up. The longtime friends launched Jewelbots, a plastic friendship bracelet that teaches girls to code. A flower adorned each Jewelbot bracelet, which was fully programmable; you could set it to react to your friends, buzzing when Bryony was near and changing color if it picked up Margie over Bluetooth, for example. It could also send secret messages to pals, and the open-source app allowed users to create their own programs, such as class schedules or texting their parents if they felt unsafe. “Girls are not one-dimensional,” Chipps told reporters. “We want to show them that you can be interested in tech and everything else that’s fun about being a girl.”
Then there’s Roominate, founded by twenty-three-year-old Alice Brooks and twenty-five-year-old Bettina Chen, two engineering undergrads, who’d come up with a novel take on the traditional dollhouse—build it yourself. Kids didn’t just have to construct it, they had to wire it; the kit included circuit boards to power lights, fans, and working elevators. They displayed it on Shark Tank, where Mark Cuban gave them $500,000 for 5 percent of their business.
This is a big deal. There’s a lot of research that shows girls lose interest in science by age eight. By eighth grade, about half as many