This weekend, another edition of the Meninas SuperCientistas event will begin at Unicamp, which aims to encourage female presence in the areas of exact sciences, technology and engineering. Over the course of five Saturdays, between November 12th and December 10th, the project will welcome students from public and private schools in Campinas and the region for an immersion in the University's scientific environment. This year, the meeting includes lectures on topics such as astrobiology and artificial intelligence, rocket launching and microorganism cultivation workshops, as well as visits to the Sirius particle accelerator and laboratories and science spaces on campus.
The event, which is in its third edition, is organized by Unicamp students, employees and teachers concerned about the low female representation in so-called STEM, an acronym in English for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. To give you an idea, at Unicamp, girls accounted for only 33,8% of enrollments in exact science courses in 2022, 30,4% in engineering and 39,5% in technology. This discrepancy is even more visible when analyzing specific courses: only 6,5% of those enrolled this year in Computer Science, 11% in Electrical Engineering and 18% in Technology in Systems Analysis and Development.
According to the project's creator, Applied and Computational Mathematics student Marcela Medicina, although it is important to encourage the entire society towards science, girls are discouraged from entering these areas. She reports that, upon entering the mathematics course, after having spent a semester in Social Sciences, she was surprised to see that on many occasions she was the only woman in the classroom, in addition to having experienced many hostile situations. “We want to encourage the girls, create a support network so that this environment is transformed for them in the future. So that it’s better than when I joined,” she argues.
Marcela created Meninas SuperCientistas in 2019, inspired by Meninas Com Ciência at the National Museum. At the time, she drew up a draft based on the original program, with the support of two friends to create the website and the artwork, in addition to sponsorship from the Campinas Open Astronomy Museum. Despite believing that she would not be taken seriously because she was an undergraduate student, Marcela sought institutional support from the University, writing a report with data from the UN (United Nations) and UNESCO (United Nations Educational Organization, the Science and Culture) on the presence of women in science. She sent this document to professor Anne Bronzi, from the Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computing (Imecc), who became the first professor to join the project.
Meninas SuperCientistas ended up becoming a success, receiving a thousand registrations in the first edition alone, of which 50 were selected by lottery. Counting all editions, the project has already received more than 5.200 applications. For Marcela, this result was a surprise because everything happened so quickly. “I had the idea in February and the event started in March”, says the university student, who maintains a relationship with the participants to this day. “We fall in love with the girls and the love is reciprocal, because we receive so much affection, it is very rewarding. And they follow us on social media and send us updates about what they're doing. I think they really see us as their scientist friends at the university,” she says.
Demystifying the image of the scientist
This year, Meninas SuperCientistas will welcome 65 students from Elementary School II. According to data from the Cracking the Code Report, published in 2018 by UNESCO, it is at this stage that girls begin to lose interest in STEM and their academic performance in this area begins to decline. “My hypothesis is that this is related to the end of childhood”, proposes Ana Augusta Xavier, one of the project coordinators. “Children are more curious, they are not ashamed to make mistakes, discover, ask questions. And the basis of science is questioning. When they start to mature, their self-esteem drops and they become more withdrawn”, she believes.
Ana Augusta is a researcher at the Faculty of Food Engineering (FEA) at Unicamp and has participated in the event since the beginning, first as a monitor and then as an organizer. Despite being in pharmacy and biochemistry, an area made up mostly of women, she says that she has always been bothered by the fact that leadership positions, such as department heads and laboratory coordinators, are occupied by men most of the time. The so-called glass ceiling, a mechanism that makes it difficult for women to access command positions, was what encouraged her to do something to change this scenario.
Although the event is organized entirely by women, with the aim of questioning the image of the scientist as a white man in a lab coat, Ana Augusta argues that these men in command positions can also contribute to the project, raising awareness about its importance and facilitating the processes for holding the event within its institutions. “I believe that this awareness would help not only with the issue of financial support, but also with the organization of the event itself, with the release of spaces, for example. There are many things that don’t need to be so bureaucratic, but end up being so, and their contribution would add a lot,” she proposes.
The importance of the contribution also extends to the community to which these students belong. One of the discomforts felt by the organizers of Meninas SuperCientistas was the fact that, after this immersion at Unicamp, the girls returned to their original environments, in which the prospect of entering a university or pursuing a scientific career is not always seen as something palpable, leaving them quite isolated. Therefore, a new feature of this third edition is that the last day of the event will receive a visit from the students' parents and guardians, who will be able to get to know the University and the ways of joining it.
Among the activities to be carried out that day, there are lectures by representatives of the Permanent Commission for Entrance Exams at Unicamp (Comvest), Ilum ambassador Ana Carolina Zeri (the science school of the National Center for Research in Energy and Materials-CNPEM ), and professor Sonia Guimarães, from the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA). “We hope that these girls, when they return home, will not feel so alone and discouraged from their goals. Because here they find not only in us, but also in other girls, a group to which they can belong and that enjoys science as much as they do”, comments Ana Augusta.
Online Experience and Perspectives
In 2022, Meninas SuperCientistas is resuming its in-person activities. In 2020, the event had to be suspended after the first meeting due to the covid-19 pandemic and only returned the following year, online. Although this transition was positive from the point of view of reach – it was possible to broadcast the event to people outside of Campinas, via the YouTube channel, and have external speakers –, the virtual model broke the most important characteristic of the event, which is create bonds between participants and enable girls to be in the university environment.
The organizers report that they are frequently asked about the possibility of increasing the number of students received at the meetings, but, in addition to the lack of physical structure, this would reduce the quality and proximity of interaction between participants. Even so, the project has plans to increase the number of editions carried out per year. “We did not imagine the potential for transformation that the project had, the number of applications we would receive and the repercussion it would generate. With that, we started to dream really big and scale the project and want to do a lot of cool things”, anticipates Marcela.
They are currently writing a mentoring project so that the girls can be monitored by scientists after participating in the event. As the students covered are in an age group that is still far from the process of choosing a professional career – the first class, from 2019, will only start taking the entrance exam in 2023 –, there is concern that this time interval could lead to they lose interest in the area. Although Meninas SuperCientistas maintains links with students via WhatsApp and social networks, the objective is to have a more structured project to monitor these girls at school.
To carry out these initiatives, Meninas SuperCientistas currently has funding from the Dean of Extension and Culture (Proec), the Faculty of Food Engineering (FEA) at Unicamp and the company Eppendorf, which produces laboratory material. Furthermore, the project was covered by the Decolas Extras Notice, from the Unicamp Patrons Patrimonial Fund, aimed at promoting education and human and technical development at the University. In recent years, they have also managed to increase the size of the team involved, which is allowing them to structure the project in a way that makes it more present on social media. With this, they hope to be able to disseminate the project idea to other institutions. “I hope that, in the same way that I was inspired, Meninas SuperCientistas inspires students, teachers and employees from other universities. And, finally, what I hope most is for girls to dominate the world”, jokes Marcela.
