By Paula Bernier
If you care about math, science, and technology, chances are good that you’re aware of the male dominance in these fields. You’re probably also aware that many organizations are now working to encourage more young women to enter into these disciplines.
Now those efforts may be aided by a work on the silver screen: the new film Hidden Figures. And none other than Google is helping to bring this movie to students across the country.
“If we want to expand the employee pipeline, we must tackle this because girls who don’t see others like them in the field tend not to go into it,” said Julie Ann Crommett, a Google employee who previously lead diversity efforts at NBC Universal, as quoted in a March 2015 USA Today story on Google’s other work along these lines.
Google also has created a coding project based on the flick. The project encourages people to make a coded message of equality to honor the female mathematicians depicted in Hidden Figures. Those who do so, Google suggests, will learn about encapsulation, objects, sequences, and variables.
The movie Hidden Figures is based on a true story of three female African-American mathematicians working for the NASA space program in the early 1960s. It stars Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe, and Octavia Spencer.
A Jan. 6 USA Today article quoted Lauren Baum, who works for Google's Made with Code program that teaches basic coding to girls, as saying: "It's such a phenomenal story of these incredible women. When you see it and when you see their energy and their passion and the fact that they actually were the people behind launching John Glenn into space, that is something that students everywhere will really aspire to."
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