>>Debbie Sterling: Hi, everybody.
I'm Debbie.
I'm an engineer.
And as you can see, I am also a girl.
[ Laughter ] >>Debbie Sterling: So big deal, right?
Well, it kind of is a big deal because only 11% of engineers in the U.S. are women.
This problem persists around the globe.
And everyone in this room knows how important engineering is.
The fastest growing jobs in the U.S. and globally are in engineering and technology.
Thanks, Google.
Thanks, so many of you in this room.
Women represent our largest untapped resource.
So people are always asking me, "Why aren't more girls interested in engineering like
you?"
And I tell them, "Well, when I was a little girl, I wasn't interested in engineering."
I wasn't one of those kids that was programming calculators at the age of four either.
I was a ballerina, like the chubby one in the back.
I loved pink.
And, yes, I did want a pony.
I was a pretty normal little girl.
But I was also very creative.
I remember going to restaurants with my parents.
I'd walk around to the tables and steal all the sugar packets and then I would build huge
castles out of them at the table while we were waiting for our grilled cheese.
The waiters and waitresses wanted to kill me.
I remember stripping all the bedsheets and taking couch cushions and building giant forts
or making double-dare-style obstacle courses with slime throwers.
I remember one year an epic Halloween constume.
Normally I went as a princess, but one year me and my two best friends built a three-part
Chinese dragon costume out of cardboard boxes.
I was the tail which meant I was always last in line for the candy.
But the costume was really cool.
So, you know, I was always making things growing up, and so it should come as no surprise that
when I was a senior in high school, my math teacher said, "Hey, next year when you go
off to college, you should consider majoring in engineering.
I think you would really love it."
And I remember that day because that word "engineering," I didn't know what it was.
And I was too embarrassed to ask her because I didn't want to sound stupid.
But I had kind of a picture in my head.
I pictured like some nerdy guy, some prodigy or genius who was just crunching, you know,
advanced algorithms all day by himself in front of a computer.
And I thought "Why would I want to do engineering?"
I thought, "I'm such a creative young girl, I would never want to -- yes, I'm good at
math and science, but I never want to do something that wouldn't allow me to express my creativity."
I went off to Stanford, and as many college freshmen, I had no idea what to major in,
and so that voice had stuck in my head from the math teacher, "You should try engineering,
I think you would like engineering."
So I signed up for Mechanical Engineering 101.
I was scared to death.
I called my mom and told her I was going into this classroom and she said, "Ewwww, why?"
[ Laughter ] >>Debbie Sterling: And I walked into the room
just so nervous, thinking, "Oh, my gosh, this is probably going to be my first F. What am
I doing here?"
Looked around.
It was all guys in the room.
And it just -- I was almost ready to turn and walk out the door.
But I stayed.
And they passed out our first assignment and it was to build a catapult, getting into groups,
and the winning group could have the catapult that threw the ball the farthest, and you
had to make it out of like a soda bottle and string and four pieces of foam core and a
paper clip.
And I thought, "Oh, wait, this is like my slime thrower from when I was a little kid.
Well, you know, I like this stuff.
I love inventing and making things and coming up with machines."
And I had no idea.
I had no idea that I would like engineering.
And so I went through the major and it occurred to me at some point that there must be so
many girls out there who are into this stuff too, and they like literally never even knew
what it was and they didn't have the math teacher say something and they never went
into the class and they thought it was just for the, you know, nerdy genius guys.
And so maybe I could do something about it.
Maybe I could come up with something for girls like all the boys have.
They get Legos, erector sets, Lincoln logs.
They have Handy Manny and Bob the Builder and they have Bill Nye the Science Guy, and
all we do is comb Barbie's hair.
We deserve something too, something made for us.
So I came up with this idea to design an engineering toy really targeted at girls.
I became obsessed.
And the first thing I did was fly to New York and go to the Toy Fair, because I wanted to
see what all the toy industry veterans and toy store owners had to say about this idea
and hopefully get some advice.
I snuck in, put on my badge, walked in there, and this was the reaction: They said -- or
more whispered -- "Construction toys for girls don't sell.
Take a look around.
It is the pink aisle after pink aisle after pink aisle of Barbie's and Bratz and decorate
the cupcakes.
This is what the girls like.
Girls don't want to be engineers.
Girls want to be princesses.
You can't fight nature."
So I was pretty dejected, I have to say, after this Toy Fair.
For about five minutes.
And then I decided, "Screw those guys.
I'm going to do it anyway."
[ Laughter ] >>Debbie Sterling: So I started getting to
work, and my very first ideas were always kind of the most obvious ones.
Like take a boy construction toy and turn it pink.
Or build the beauty parlor, build the spa.
And I thought, "No, that's not good enough.
We can go deeper.
Girls are more than that."
So I started doing research, article after article about gender differences, and one
day it really just hit me.
I was in the living room of this family.
We had construction toys out and the girls were playing with them but getting kind of
bored.
So I asked, "Well, what's your favorite toy"?
And the little girl said, "I love this book," and she ran upstairs and gave me the book,
and she said, "Let's read this story together."
And I'm sitting there with this book on my lap and the construction toys on the other
side of the room and I thought, "Why not combine them?
How about instead of an instruction manual, I write stories about a girl character named
GoldieBlox and she's an engineer, and as you follow her adventures, she has to solve problems
by building machines and the girls will get to build what Goldie builds and it would give
them a reason, a purpose, somebody they could relate to, and they'd be building something
that does something."
That was the idea.
And I made a prototype out of like thread spools and stuff from the hardware store,
whatever I could find.
I wrote and drew this story, and I remember going to one of my very first prototype tests,
this 6-year-old girl named Tessa.
I was shaking, I was so nervous.
"What if she hates what I've been working on for months?"
I was about to throw up when I walked in there.
And what was even worse, her mom whispered to me, "Beware, she's really into fairies,"
and this was her bedroom.
It was like the enchanted forest.
I'm like, "I'm screwed, she's not going to like this toy."
But we started playing it together and I'm observing her kind of read about Goldie, and
I show this video because it's one of my favorite ones.
The kids never play with it the way that you think that they will.
We had like a little Goldie action figure and she used it as a hammer and started drilling
all the pegs into the pegboard, making all these noises, and just having a blast with
it building all this stuff I never would have thought.
And her mom looks at me and shrugs, "Well, she likes fairies but I guess she likes tools
too.
Who knew?"
And I went to the homes of hundreds of girls, and each time these fairy princesses in their
tutus also happened to like building belt drives with GoldieBlox.
Who knew?
They just needed to get shown what else is out there.
When you're inundated with pinkened princesses, it's no wonder girls like these things, but
it's our job to kind of show them what else they could like too.
So when the testing went so well, I decided to bring the toy to market, and I knew that
the toy stores probably weren't going to buy it, so I lunched on Kickstarter.
And in the course of three months, presold over a million dollars of GoldieBlox toys.
And one year later today we're now in the -- nationwide in Toys R Us and one of the
best selling toys on Amazon.
[ Applause ] >>Debbie Sterling: So it turns out construction
toys for girls do sell.
[ Laughter ] >>Debbie Sterling: And the best part is what
the girls are doing with it is unbelievable.
Every day we get photos and emails and videos probably filmed by GoPro of this awesome stuff
that these girls are building.
You wouldn't believe it.
Like, double-decker merry go rounds and not just the stuff that they're building but the
mind-set, too.
We had a mom post on our Facebook wall the other day.
She had ran out of tape on her tape dispenser and was about to throw it away and her daughter
said, No, mommy, don't throw that away.
I can use that to spin something like Goldie.
It's hilarious to, like, look at their world in a different way and think about what they
can build.
There are millions of girls around the world who are engineers but just don't know it yet,
and I hope GoldieBlox will show them.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]