Hey Guys! This video is going to be
a little different than my other videos.
Instead of covering a scientific paper,
I decided instead to make a video in honor of
international women's day!
In this video I'm going to address a question
that I get asked sometimes.
That question is what is it like to be a woman in science.
That's a tough one
because I only know my own experience.
I don't know what it's like for everyone, but
for me, most of the time my being a woman
and my being a scientist have nothing to do with one another.
Those are the best days.
But there are definitely days where I get talked over or
I get something explained to me
even though I'm there as the expert in that topic.
It's what you might call "mansplaining."
I'm definitely guilty of saying sorry
when I'm not actually sorry at all!
It's just kind of an automatic response.
I say sorry to myself.
I say sorry to my cat!
I'm guilty of also saying that I was fortunate to
have something happen to me, which doesn't
indicate what is actually the case...
which is where I worked really hard and was really dedicated,
and I have skills in that area.
Fortune and luck has nothing to do with it.
Sometimes these little things that
I do myself like saying sorry or
saying I was fortunate or
these things that others do to me like
talking over me or mansplaining...
they get heavy.
Sometimes they get so heavy that I think to myself
I can't do this.
I can't be a scientist. I can't juggle my career and
my family and my friends and my whole life
and how could I ever think that I could do that.
Then I snap out of it you know.
I realized that there are people everywhere
doing exactly that.
There are women all over the world and
they're not saying sorry.
They're not saying they were fortunate to get into that circumstance.
What they're doing is they're having
their career, they're having their family,
they're having their friends, they're having their life!
That's incredibly inspiring to me!
One place that I expected to
get some inspiration, but
perhaps not as much as I actually got,
was an event that ended recently and
it was a women in STEM leadership event.
You might expect that I got the
inspiration from the women that were STEM leaders, but
in fact I got the inspiration from the students,
the attendees that came to the event.
I was probably more inspired by them than
I was inspiring to them.
Like all of the events that I go to, I had them draw
on my whiteboard and usually I give a prompt and that prompt is something like..
draw something that you know from science or
draw something small like through a microscope, but
this time I wanted to be inspired and I wanted to
see what the future generations think of science.
So, I asked them to draw "like a girl"
because I hate that phrase!
I hate the phrase "like a girl" because
it is one of my greatest fears that I'm going to
do really well in my career be at the top
of the science field and have someone say...
"Well she did a really good job for a girl."
I want to smash "like a girl" or
"for a girl" into tiny tiny pieces and
rebuild it into something much better because
I know that girls can run the world!
The qualifier "like a girl" ...
doesn't actually mean anything.
So, to end on a positive note I want to
show you some of the drawings and
some of the things that the attendees of this event said ...
and how much they inspired me.
Some of the drawings that I'm going to show you are some of the
the funniest or the most serious, most inspiring or just the most wonderful things I've had
drawn on my whiteboard so far.
I hope you enjoy it.
I drew a girl with blue hair because
it's always good to be different.
A girl reading a book about science.
Me drawing a picture and
a girl saying Wow!
I drew myself hitting a baseball.
Crew oars because that's my new spring sport this year.
A Forensic Pathologist!
A Scientist.
I drew a computer with a program on it.
Me painting my nails.
Some girls playing volleyball.
That's me doing things people thought I couldn't do as a female and as a black girl.
A couple. It's two women. They just got married. They're in love.
A lab coat that says my name on it.
A picture of like what I want to do as a
dream job. I want to be a game designer!
The world, Earth, from above it might look
extremely small, but down here we have to make the most of what we have, and
that's what girls do. They work for what they get.
They pass all these societal
expectations and limitations from their gender, and
they just go above and beyond what they ever thought they could do.
Thank you so much to the New York Hall of Science for inviting me to
your Women in STEM Leadership Night! I really really appreciated the opportunity!
And thank you to all of the attendees at the event that drew on my whiteboard and
that talked to me and that inspired me!
The future has never looked brighter in my opinion.
I hope you guys liked how I took your drawings, and
feel free to subscribe to my channel for more science updates!
I'll see you guys next time!