Jewliebots is an endeavor that comes from the heart and attempts to address an important issue in our patriarchal society. Sara Chipps and Maria Paula Saba, a Masters candidate from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, started Jewliebots to get young girls more interested in the male-dominated fields of computer science and engineering.
Currently seeking investment for mass manufacturing, Jewliebots is a form of techie couture that both looks neat and teaches teenage girls to code. The prototype is a flexible 3D printed bracelet with LED lights, buttons and a motion sensor. By plugging the Jewliebots bracelet into a computer via USB capable, wearers can download a program to the accessory to blink and flash fashionably. The open source software behind the bracelet has been made extremely simple so that almost anyone can program it, making it perfect for inexperienced, would-be programmers.
As the Jewliebots site explains, “Tech is a male dominated field. Girls are discouraged to follow a tech career for several reasons, like lack of role models and CS intimidating environments. Computer Sciences jobs are increasing at an incredible rate and women won’t be able to compete for these jobs if they don’t learn programming.” They’ve also embedded, on their site, the awesome documentary She++ below, which relays some shocking facts about the gender disparity in technological fields.
To get more women into fields like Computer Science, the creators of Jewliebots believe that a combination of fashionable accessories and programming is one possible solution, saying on their site, “Jewliebots introduces software education to teenaged girls in a way that is appealing to them” and that “this project’s goal is to engage and increase girls’ interest in the workings of technology by showing them that coding can be also beautiful.”
Their intentions are great, attempting to get women more involved in the male-dominated field of computer science. Their execution does, however, reinforce some of the usual stereotypes about women. When I asked my wife how she felt about Jewliebots, she emailed me the following:
[This project is] important because its working to level out the playing field and show young women that they are just as capable as men and can succeed and thrive in a currently male-dominated industry. But I have a bit of an issue with the slight implication that the reason the industry is male-dominated is because women haven’t been shown that it can be “beautiful” or that technology wouldn’t be interesting if we couldn’t somehow wear it. The reason why young women don’t pursue more computer science careers is because a lot of them have been conditioned to think that they can’t. I think that this project could have just as easily focused on something else – like building robots – and, as long as those girls were given strong female role models and were told that they were capable, I think they’d totally be into it.
I get that they’re trying to work with what they have though. And that a lot of girls are being socialized into thinking they should only pursue things that can be “beautiful” or girly, but they’re reinforcing a stereotype, while working against it at the same time. I don’t want to give them a hard time, but I just hope that they offer something besides jewelry in the future.
As the project has only just begun, there’s still an opportunity for Jewliebots to become a bit less jewlie, while still attracting teenage girls. With Sara Chipps involved, who co-founded Girl Develop It to get women involved in software development, there’s a good chance that Jewliebots will provide women with positive techie role models the way that Chipps’s non-profit has.
Source: Vitamin W
