Halloween Candy Machine | Part 3 of 8
Fictional origin stories
The “girl genius” tropes that fuel imposter syndrome
This is a standalone article within a multi-part series.
Like a baby duckling, I imprinted on the pop culture of the 80s. When I was growing up, female scientists on the big and small screen were few and far between. I clung to the ones that felt even mildly believable, but there was always something missing. Kelly McGillis in Top Gun was a more convincing astrophysicist than Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough, but it wasn’t until Jodie Foster played Dr. Ellie Arroway in Contact that I felt like I was watching a real astrophysicist rather than a caricature of one.
It’s gotten better. I love Dr. Grace in Avatar and Shuri in Black Panther and linguist Louise Banks in Arrival. But motion pictures need to move fast to advance the plot, and there’s rarely time to show how the female scientist, engineer, or inventor actually got there. And I’ve noticed that a fair number of products and picture books targeted at my daughter’s age play to the same tropes as these movies, where the girl genius just is a girl genius. This is where things sometimes go sideways for me.
I don’t think the movies above owe me an origin story, but any STEM product or STEM book targeted at young girls needs to do better than that.
The Myth of Magic Intuition
Here’s an origin story that, to me, sits right at the edge of being relatable. It’s funny, it’s in character for the series, and it works well within the episode arc.
I’m talking about how Kaylee met Mal and the rest of the crew in Episode 8 of Firefly, “Out of Gas.”
The gag here is that Kaylee unintentionally steals Bester’s job out from under him by correctly diagnosing a mechanical problem that Bester thought was elsewhere. I’m going to transcribe the moment when Mal starts to take her seriously. (Fans of Firefly will recall that this is the safe-for-work portion of the scene.)
Mal: “Where’d you learn how to do that, miss?”
Kaylee: “Just do it, that’s all. My daddy says I got a natural talent.”
Mal: “I’ll say you do at that… You work for your daddy, do you?”
Kaylee: “Well, when he got work. Which ain’t too often lately.”
Mal: “You got much experience with a vessel like this?”
Kaylee: “I never even been up on one before.”
Mal: “Want it?”
Kaylee: “You mean…?”
Mal: “Sure.”
Kaylee: “For how long?”
Mal: “Long as you’d like. Long as you can keep her in the sky.”
Kaylee: “You offering me a job?”
Mal: “Believe I just did.”
I’m not going to claim this scene is wholly unbelievable because I’m aware that this is what intuition looks like from the outside.
How many times have I walked up to someone’s computer screen, sized up the situation, and said, “The problem’s over here, not over there.” It’s magic, right?
How many times have I tried to explain my Comparative Literature-to-Software-Engineering arc? It’s natural talent, right?
And how many times have I gotten hired with as little experience as Kaylee? Twice, actually.
And yet…
“It’s magic!” is not the answer I want to give to my daughter when she confronts math, physics, and engineering as a “hard science,” beyond the Kiwi Crate level. Much as there is to be said about intuition (and I will say more in the context of the candy machine design), there comes a point where it’s impossible to have a STEM career without some form of a STEM education.
I learned on the job and via evening classes, and later got a lucky break while interviewing at a conference. It wasn’t magic, and I have regrets about some of the more time-consuming dead ends. So I’m committed to guiding my kids down a better-designed early route. Regardless of whether they end up having STEM careers, I want them to have a positive lifelong relationship with STEM.
The Myth of Isolated Genius
I’m grateful that publishers are finally producing picture books about confident, creative, tool-wielding girls. But I sometimes feel like I’m reading a book written by a cheerleading outsider rather than a helpful insider.
To take just one example, here are a few pages from Interstellar Cinderella by Deborah Underwood. Let me be clear: I don’t hate this book. I have nothing against parents who buy it or daughters who love it. But I passed on it after flipping through it at the bookstore because I didn’t think I was capable of reading it aloud dozens of times without wanting to throw it at the wall.
On Page 1, we meet Cinderella. On Page 2, we get a few brief lines about how she acquired her abilities to fix rockets.
Cinderella goes on to fix the prince’s ship, get invited to the Gravity-Free Ball, and leave her socket wrench behind when the clock strikes midnight. The prince decides he’ll search the cosmos for her. He goes around the galaxy offering up the socket wrench to all the eligible ladies, but no one except Cinderella actually knows how to fix rocket ships with it. Once he finds her, he asks to marry her. She says no and decides she’ll be his mechanic instead, and together they zoom off to the stars.
Glowing Amazon reviews laud this strong and independent heroine, which makes me feel a bit churlish for wanting to know whether technology has advanced to the point where fixing a robot dishwasher or zoombroom is a breeze compared with replacing a worn-out part on a regular dishwasher or jumpstarting a car or setting up a new Wifi router. Even entry-level tinkering can be deeply frustrating, and you don’t learn it by studying a manual late at night in your room. You need the right tools, you need the right materials, and you almost certainly need a mentor and some form of social support.
I’m fully aware that this is just a picture book and that picture books are allowed to take creative liberties, but my gut feeling is that little girls will eventually realize that what comes easily to Interstellar Cinderella does not come easily to them, and conclude that engineering is not for them.
One could ask why boys don’t come to the same conclusion when greeted with genius-level cartoon boys such as, say, Jimmy Neutron. I think part of the answer lies in the fact that boys have so many other role models. They don’t need to be like Jimmy Neutron or Steve Jobs to have a career in a technical field. They can be like Dad the engineer or Grandpa the auto mechanic. When I read picture books aloud to my daughter, I sometimes feel like it’s Marie Curie or bust. Her options are the genius-level historical figures and the genius-level fictional characters.
I actually have a specific book recommendation to scratch the Interstellar Cinderella itch: Mae Among the Stars, by Roda Ahmed. It’s a biography of Mae Jemison, the first Black female astronaut to fly on a space mission. My daughter loves it. It has the same outer space theme and the same empowerment theme, but without (for me, at least) that nagging sense of wrongness, the feeling that I’m not hearing an engineer’s own voice.
The Myth of Perpetual Inspiration
My daughter adores Rosie Revere, Engineer and its sequels by Andrea Beaty. I like them too, but I’ll offer a small word of caution — or perhaps validation — for adults.
The series does so many things right. The kids encounter obstacles, get frustrated, and refuse to quit. But I think the books, in their relentless exuberance, help promote a subtle myth about creativity that might not have much effect on kids, but that bites adults hard.
The books are great for their intended audience. But all too often, the baton they pass to an older audience doesn’t get taken along a meaningful route. Instead, the picture-book simplifications and departures from reality get baked in, and adults are left with a false impression of what inspiration is supposed to look like.
I’ve seen so many creative adults who start but don’t finish projects. Or who buy a lot of materials and do a lot of research but never actually begin. I think one culprit is the myth that creativity is supposed to be inspiring all the way through. While I don’t pretend to be a shining model of success, people do ask me how I finish personal creative projects and my very prosaic answer is, “Find a way to slog through the boring parts and troubleshoot through the hard parts.”
One Step at a Time
I’m not sure that Disney’s Cinderella needs an interstellar rebranding in order to tell girls how to succeed in engineering. All we need to do is shine a spotlight the real heroes of the story: those mice, trying to get a hopelessly heavy key up that interminable flight of stairs.
We do kids a disservice when we gloss over that part of the engineering journey. The mice-getting-the-key-up-the-stairs part.
While second-grader Rosie Revere is building cheese-copters that fly, my first-grader Nora is building bridges out of Popsicle sticks and scrap plywood.
The bridge broke almost immediately.
Nora got upset that her bridge broke, and I can’t really blame naysayers or external factors for it. The bridge didn’t break because an adult was unsympathetic or laughed at her dreams, it broke because she used hot glue and butt joints on pieces of plywood. Wrong glue, wrong joints. There are ways to get that bridge to work, that feel empowering and achievable (note to “real woodworkers”: I am going to smack you upside the head if you suggest a mortise-and-tenon joint). But my kid’s not going to be satisfied with being told that for one shining moment, her bridge stood. Nor should she.
I don’t want to devalue the exuberant joy that comes with invention, which is captured so well in so many of these depictions. But sometimes I need to be the person in the room who says out loud what everyone else is thinking, which is that building, inventing, and troubleshooting is a pain in the butt. And that chewing through difficulties is often unremittingly un-fun.
The Questioneers chapter books about Rosie Revere and her friends begin to do this, but the limiting factor is their audience. Most 6-year olds don’t really have the capacity to troubleshoot or iterate. Instead, they joyfully take the same wrong approach over and over again until the joy turns into rage and frustration. Much as I’m thrilled by how much Nora loves Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters (it was the first chapter book she read all by herself), I’m also conscious that it inhabits a place in a 6-year old’s imagination that’s as much magic as it is STEM.
Here’s a fragment of a text exchange I had with my friends Michelle and Evangeline, a software engineer and a program manager at a major tech company. Evangeline is the friend who urged me to write about UI on Medium.
Is any part of this text exchange children’s book-worthy? Not in its current form. But it’s what the creative process is actually like: “Let’s make something! This is hard. Let’s learn the power of taking breaks so you don’t break the computer or sewing machine.”
STEM projects are hard, and the social dynamics of studying and working in STEM fields can be even harder. I don’t know any adult female engineer who hasn’t had to navigate some dark, lonely, and terrifying spaces in order to get to where she is today. There can be deep joy, friendships, and mentors in male-dominated corridors. There is also guaranteed isolation, frustration, and profound disorientation.
Kind of like what Sandra Bullock’s astronaut encounters in Gravity.
Is it worth it? I can’t tell you that. But, hey, I can show you how to build a pretty awesome candy machine.
Next in the candy machine series: My own origin stories, offered as a counterpoint to the fictional ones.
