How Girl Scout Innovators Charmed Obama’s White House: The Politics of Advocacy for Young Women in STEM

Abstract: In 2011, President Obama told Silicon Valley, “We’re emphasizing teaching girls math, . . . making science cool.” Such high-visibility calls to bring more young women into STEM validated a dramatic revolution in the gendered intellectual and social worlds of science and technology. Postwar American culture had equated academic rigor with masculinity, ridiculing suggestions of women handling the toughest physics, or engineering. Sputnik-era “manpower” alarms often boxed women into lab-assistant support-roles. But by the twenty-first-century, multi-million-dollar initiatives to encourage more young women to pursue STEM had proliferated. Colleges, K-12 educators, corporations, and non-profits created “Girls Who Code” programs, science camps, and hundreds of other outreach projects. Enthusiasts developed entire new genres of toys, children’s books, websites, and television shows, geared to cultivating girls’ science enthusiasm. This article traces the history of how the Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies approached issues of young women and STEM education, which had come to command national attention.