Cristal Glangchai - VentureGirls: Raising Girls to be Tomorrows Leaders

I MAGINE A GIRL WHO AT FIVE IS AN ENTREPRENEURIAL WONDER. S HE scores at the genius level for thinking outside the box, collaborates beautifully with her friends to solve problems, and spends her time making new toys with whatever resources she has. Shes intrigued by science, math, and technology, and while she may find these subjects challenging at times, she tackles the tough questions persistently until an answer finally emerges. Shes visionary, creative, innovative, resilient, and, most important, unafraid to take risks to get what she wants. This kind of person is in desperate demand across the global economy and in our own society, which is striving to maintain leadership in a hypercompetitive world. The most extraordinary thing is, Im actually describing nearly every five-year-old girl. At this age, according to one expert, 98 percent of children are naturally brilliant in these remarkable traits.

But then something terrible happens. The genius takes a precipitous dive. These bold, imaginative powers are conditioned out by societal pressure and educated out by a system designed to create the boundaries valued by the old world, not the new. The girls who dared to dream bigwho were empowered to be curious and follow their passions, who dreamed of creating technologies, careers, and businesses with the potential to solve the grand challenges of our societybegin to opt out.

Each year, millions of girls who are vital to our nations future abandon their dreams. The social forces that discourage girls from pursuing their full potential begin to affect them before kindergarten, become cruel in middle school, and erode their confidence further as they mature.

It can happen when a girl finds her schools computer club dominated by boys who subtly or overtly exclude, taunt, or reject her, or when an aspiring female entrepreneur is continually ignored or interrupted in the business classes at her high school. By the time they are eighteen, young women who choose to major in fields like math, engineering, or business find themselves seriously outnumbered.

If young women look at the makeup of the workplaces they might enter, they see that the ratios are often worse. They cannot help noticing that the leadership positions are largely held by men, and they find themselves asking, Where are the women? No wonder so many girls quietly give up on the dream of being among the future innovators and change makers of tomorrow.

I want to change this, and I hope you do, too.

What if this didnt happen to girls? What if there was a window in a girls life when just the right dose of learning at the just right time could snap the downward spiral, and produce a girl whose gifts were available for the rest of her life? What could this new kind of girlan undiminished girl, a VentureGirlbecome?

I am an engineer, a nanoscientist, a professor, and an entrepreneur. So Ive approached the problem in the spirit of a scientist intent on discovery. Why do some women forge ahead in science, technology, engineering, and maththe so-called STEM fieldsand rise into leadership positions, while others give up? What interventions might change this pattern? What can we do that will really work?

The challenge is to bring STEM to life for girlsto make it relevant to them. We can no longer afford to live in a world where more than one-half of the population is essentially excluded from the cutting edge. We need those brilliant minds at work. Furthermore, we can no longer cheat so many young women out of the pride and joy that come from finding a vocation in innovation. Its critical for our girls and for our future as a society to attract girls to the STEM fields, and to create a world where both men and women actively participate in building the future.

Through my experiences, I have found that the key to lifting up the next generation of girls is to blend STEM with entrepreneurship. And we cant just teach girlswe must teach boys at the same time, so that they understand that girls are equally capable of achievement, creativity, and leadership.

I believe in this approach because Im a product of it. Ive experienced how empowering and fulfilling technology and entrepreneurship can be.

Ever since I was a kid, Ive loved building things and taking things apart to figure out how they worked. I remember as a child picking up a screwdriver and taking apart my familys mustard-yellow rotary telephone to see what made it work. (If you dont remember what a rotary telephone was, it had lots of gears and moving parts.) I found the dozens of parts inside the phone pretty amazing.

At first, my parents were upset. In those days before cell phones and e-mail, the home phone was a familys only means of communication. But heres the extraordinary thing: Rather than scolding me and stifling my excitement, they let me experiment. They tried to explain how the phone worked and then helped me put it back together.

My parents approach to life was about curiosity and unfettered expression. More important, they were not focused on what I should and shouldnt do as a girl.

My father himself had overcome difficult times. He grew up on the streets in Mexico, not knowing where his next meal would come from. His parents both had only elementary school educations, and his dad died when my father was young. When his shoes became torn, he would put cardboard in them to cover the holes. Nonetheless, he had the drive, ambition, and fearlessness he needed to make a better world for himself. Penniless and knowing little English, he came to the United States to study, and that is where I was born.

I was raised to do anything a boy could do. My Sunday dress was just that. The rest of the week, I was free to play in the mud or tinker with broken appliances in the garage. It was a hands-on childhood that included cardboard imaginary castles, GI Joes, and Legos. Back then, girls were more likely to be given pink toys, miniature stoves, irons, and Barbie dolls to play with instead. But my sisters and I were allowed to get messy, dirty, and greasy. If we wanted a tree house or even a dollhouse, we watched our dad build it and helped him. We were highly involved in sports, and our dad taught us everything from electrical wiring to tiling floors to changing brake pads in the carand we loved it.

We often joked that our dad treated us like boys because he wished hed had some sons, too. But we shouldnt have! Today, studies show that by playing with those stereotyped boy toys at an early age, we girls were developing the spatial relation skills wed need for our education and future careers in STEM.

Dad encouraged us in math and science, often bringing home science and electronics kits. If we had trouble with math in school, instead of telling us that maybe it just wasnt for us, he would get us a tutor. We were lucky to be able to afford these luxuries, but the most important thing he gave us was free: He always told us we could do and be whatever we wanted if we worked hard and followed our passion.

In all these ways, my dad gave me the tools I needed to be comfortable being the only girl in male-dominated classes at schooland, later, in male-dominated workplaces. His curiosity and fearlessness got baked into my personality. It was a natural progression for me to get involved in science projects and contests at school. I was a math-and-sciencesmitten girl, almost oblivious to the fact that most of my fellow geeks were guys. I thought I could do anything as long as I put my mind to it. And I did, winning science fairs and scholarships.