Look, Ma… No Pocket Protector!

If you know us or you’ve read our first post, you’d know we’re lawyers by profession and runners and non-profit volunteers by passion. Tonight I attended a “Women in Intellectual Property Law – Going Global” Continuing Legal Education program. One of the panelists spoke about the gender disparity in a few specific fields, namely patent law and engineering (especially electrical and computer engineering), where the gender gap is skewed 80% men. This speaker recounted Mattel’s selection of this year’s “I Can Be…” edition of Barbie. Girls overwhelmingly voted for News Anchor Barbie in Mattel’s official online poll, but a society of women engineers rallied significant support for a Computer Engineer Barbie on Facebook and other social media networks; Mattel decided to launch both. News Anchor Barbie wears a frilly pink skirt suit, high heels and pretty makeup, while Computer Engineer Barbie wears glasses, flat shoes, slacks and a binary-code-patterned shirt and is described as “geek chic.”

While I applaud Mattel for creating the “I Can Be…” series of Barbies with the intention of showing young girls they can be anything, including an engineer, we need to do more to teach girls that their career path – and their life path – is not limited by how they look or where they come from. I’m not sure Mattel really succeed in meeting the "I Can Be..." series’ intentions based on the way News Anchor Barbie and Computer Engineer Barbie are respectively accessorized and described.

What does this have to do with a blog about RUNNING? Well, it makes me proud to be a Girls on the Run coach and a GOTR SoleMates fundraising run team member because I can see how far we’ve come and yet how far we still have to go in teaching girls not to feel boxed into any path based on looks, race, economic status or any other category plagued by stereotype. GOTR has been a phenomenal influence in the lives of the girls they serve by their 12-week seasonal programs. The Manhattan chapter’s Spring 2010 season just ended (read about it here), but I’ll be back for the Fall 2010 season to continue helping GOTR reach out to young girls in the NYC area – and hoping that we help them break free of the peer pressures that are exerted on them.

If you would like to see GOTR in action off-season, consider running with girls and coaches of the Pocono GOTR chapter (and me!) at the Poconos’ Wurst 5K Trail Run at Shawnee Mountain in PA on Sunday, July 18. The course follows the shady trails of Shawnee Mountain and is walker friendly. Also, your entry fee includes admission to the Poconos’ Wurst Festival, an “Oktoberfest in July” event at Shawnee Mountain. Hope to see you there!