"I came up with an 'aha' that construction toys do really help develop spatial skills and are a good precursor for engineering, but they have been heavily marketed toward boys for over 100 years," Sterling said. So she delved into the research, spending the next nine months studying the toy industry and children's media, meeting with neuroscientists and preschool teachers, and observing kids play. that boys are inherently better at math and science and that's why there are no girls in engineering and there was nothing I could do to change that," Sterling said. " suggested the reason why girls and women don't enter engineering is a biological reason. She discovered that attitudes and cultural differences in those regions were to blame. She realized the toys led to her interest in engineering and wondered if the absence of engineering toys for young girls was responsible for the gender gap in STEM. The idea was obvious, yet potentially groundbreaking, Sterling recalled.ĭespite the general assumption that boys outperform girls in math and science, Sterling found the opposite to be true everywhere but North America and Western Europe. Idea brunches were a longstanding tradition for Sterling a comfortable gathering where her friends would share ideas ranging from an art project to an app, she explained.Īt the idea brunch, one of Sterling's Stanford friends expressed her frustrations about the lack of women in STEM and said she'd played with her brothers' hand-me-down construction toys as a child. Sterling was working a stale job in marketing when the concept for GoldieBlox struck her during an "idea brunch" in 2011. Changing attitudes about girls' capabilities in STEM, however, proved much harder. Getting girls interested in engineering at an early age was an easy sell, Sterling told Business Insider in an interview. 59 on the BI 100: The Creators) has sold more than 1 million sets of narrative-driven construction toys. Stanford-educated engineer Debbie Sterling is on a mission to increase that percentage by encouraging girls as young as four years old to start tinkering with toys and building simple machines. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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