If you're in favor of getting more girls interested in science, we have some bad news:
These are workshops offered at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Science Center, and they've started to cause an uproar on Carnegie's Facebook page and news sites like Jezebel.
And it's easy to see why: there's an imbalance in the quantity of programs for girl v. boy scouts, but also a distinct difference in the types of workshops offered. The boy scouts' programs have simple titles with no explanation: chemistry, engineering, robotics. But this is how the Center's website describes the girls' "Science with a Sparkle" program:
Prepare to be dazzled! Dive into chemistry and learn how science relates to health and beauty products. Become a cosmetic chemist and concoct your own creations to take home.
Sweet merciful crap.
Now, to be fair to Carnegie, this photo is of one-quarter of one page in a Carnegie pamphlet. The rest of that page, as Facebooker AJ Tarnas pointed out on Carnegie's wall, lists career-exploration science events aimed specifically at girls.
Furthermore, Carnegie has responded on its Facebook page with a thoughtful take on the need to provide science education to girls. And really, their answer shed far more light on the gender STEM gap than their workshop offerings themselves did: The problem, they said, is that the girls aren't interested.
Regarding Girl Scout-specific programming, we have struggled when it comes to enrollments for our Girl Scout programs. In the past, we have offered engineering, chemistry, and robotics programming for Girl Scouts. ... Unfortunately, no troops signed up for these. The programs that consistently get enrollments are "Science with a Sparkle" and our Sleepovers at the museum.
So if girls only seem to want glitter and lip gloss, then it's hard to get them excited about test tubes and astronomy just by offering those programs.
So it's not-great news all around. Yes, it looks awfully bad for a science center to offer sparkle-centric science programs for girls. But clearly something is teaching those girls to vastly prefer lip gloss to robots.