What's aspiration got to do with it?

Tonight, our friends Finding Ada are running an event at Conway Hall in London around funding to support getting more women and girls into STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

This thorough but readable to non specialists report released in March 2014 by our friends Science_Grrl discusses all kinds of challenges to girls and women at all stages, whether that's at school, university, when entering a career in STEM or even later in life with years of experience behind them. The reality is that there are fewer women than men in STEM and that girl and women still face discrimination and barriers - structural, personal, invisible, explicit - related to gender.

A question that gets raised is why are organisations focusing on this when there are other problems to solve. Is this not just a first world problem? Shouldn't the be directing all our energy into eradicating FGM, stopping child brides and trafficking?

I think (and I'm clear that this is what I think not what the team here think) that there are two reasons why it's important to do this.

One reason is that, as we saw recently with the comments made by Tim Hunt about 'girls' causing problems in science labs by making men fall in love with them and crying (I mean, REALLY) there is still institutional sexism in science. (As an aside this brilliant take down by Dean Burnett @garwboy was shared by Woman Who Knows Helen Czerski and others) That is stopping girls and women from following their hearts, doing what they love, attaining their own fulfillment and contributing to progress in society.

The other reason I think it's important is about aspiration and I'm aware I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege - but I'm also speaking from a position where for *reasons* I had no aspiration, didn't even think it was possible that I could have. And then that light got switched on once and I never looked back. The girls who are being trafficked, the girls being married at nine years old, the women who have experienced FGM all have the right to hope and to aspire to pursue their dreams, their passions, their interests - even their idle curiosities. How can we know that that they don't want to be doctors, scientists, engineers, astronauts? Haven't we got a responsibility to make those places ready for them even if the time won't come for them to take that opportunity yet? When I read about female fighter pilots in Afghanistan I cheer - another stereotype chipped away at can't be a bad thing.

The fight for equality for women is being fought on many fronts and I think I that's ok. One of the great things about humans is our ability to specialise so it makes sense to me that we do what we're good at and act separately, together, to do something bigger than we can do alone, I think that's ok. I think that's good.

So here's to aspiration. To girls and women daring to dream - and believing that one day they might make their own dreams come true.