Update: Ha! They took down the video. Fortunately it’s copied here. The EU commission has acknowledged its goof, and wants to make a list of real women scientists.
I can’t come up with a better phrase for this video than Peter Coles did: “patronizing drivel.” And YouTube users — not always the most discriminating bunch — agree, giving it “55 likes, 1,848 dislikes.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZtMmt5rC6g
They mean well. It’s a video from the European Commission on Research and Innovation, trying to get girls interested in science. A noble goal, and we should be thinking of innovative ways to make it happen.
The problem is that whoever made the video clearly starts from the assumption that girls hate actual science, and therefore the route to increasing their interest is to pretend that science is all about lipstick and sunglasses and runway models draped in pink. Science isn’t actually about that. But science is interesting! For girls and boys alike.
If you want to make science seem exciting to girls, it helps to start from a perspective that science is interesting to all human beings, and that girls are human beings.
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Try telling that to guys who do ballet on pointe when they go shopping for pointe shoes. Damn near impossible to find any.
Fortunately, the shoes last nearly forever, since men aren’t allowed to dance on pointe professionally, except in drag.
The video is as awful as Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science” – but Oingo sounds better.
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