Electric Woman Teaches Girls STEM, Criticizes Social Media Feminists
16 Sept. 2018
Flor Serna, 25, is running late at work. She apologizes over the phone and asks if we can push the interview from 5 p.m. to 5:40. It’s 4:42. Outside her apartment, grey clouds blanket the Tuesday evening skyline and a soft rain drizzles on mid-city New Orleans. Nearby, a calico cat squeezes through a gap in her neighbor’s chain-link fence and disappears under the house to escape the weather. Across the street, three brown sparrows take turns bathing in a small pool of water that’s gathered on top of a dented black trash can lid. A pickup truck drives by and rattles over potholes—spooking the sparrows and sending them to the sheltering branches of a nearby crepe myrtle. At 5:25, Serna texts, “5:45!” followed by “I'm in my car, but traffic.”
At 5:51, Serna arrives in her blue Jeep Grand Cherokee. She gets out and immediately apologizes for changing the date and time of our interview so often. She unlocks her front door and we enter.
Inside her apartment, rows of potted cacti and succulents cramp her shallow window sills. Two large ferns hang from the exposed metal plumbing that runs across her kitchen ceiling, and three more ferns dangle from another overhead pipe in her front room. An acoustic guitar and an old, dusty keyboard sit upright against the wall. The two books on her coffee table are titled Financial Leadership and Bookkeeping Basics. She doesn’t own a TV, and there's no computer in sight. This is hardly the apartment one would expect to house the Founder and Executive Director of Electric Girls, a nonprofit organization that teaches young girls everything from computer animation to circuit building and robotics.
Born and raised in Albuquerque, NM, Serna interned at a recording studio while attending high school. Through that experience, her passions for audio engineering and music technology cemented and launched her toward her current career.
“I was in the middle of the college search process, and that internship confirmed my move to New Orleans to attend Loyola University where I received a scholarship and knew that they had a great recording studio and Music Industries program. After enrolling though, I really didn’t like the Music Industries program—it was much more focused on the music business side than I cared about—I wanted to spend all my time in the recording studio,” Serna says.
She leans back, pushing herself deeper into the couch cushions, and puts her feet on the coffee table. She’s taken her shoes off already, showcasing her black, teal, and white striped socks. She looks exhausted and speaks softly—with a voice that seems only a few decibels louder than the low hum of her air conditioner. In her hands, she fiddles with a nail clipper, opening and closing it, but doesn’t use it.
Dissatisfied with Loyola’s Music Industries program, Serna created a contract degree and majored in Music Technology with minors in Computer Science and Business. Since she was an honors student at Loyola, she was required to write a thesis.
“I decided to research a problem and a curiosity that was close to me: why there were no other women working in the recording studios I worked in and why there weren’t any more women in my Computer Science classes,” Serna says. “This research quickly grew into why women don’t pursue STEM fields at an academic or professional level. Then, the paper morphed into why girls in elementary school have already developed the idea that boys are more skilled than girls in STEM. I became interested in programs designed to combat this issue, and I didn’t see any programs specifically dealing with this problem in New Orleans. So, I asked Loyola if I could scrap the research paper and pilot these projects in New Orleans schools and collect data on their impact. I called it Electric Girls because I couldn’t think of a better name. And Loyola said yes, which I’m so grateful for.”
Since its inception in 2015, Electric Girls has become a registered 501(c)3 non-profit. It’s grown to provide 12 after-school programs, 3 Saturday programs, occasional pop-up/one-day workshops, annual summer camps, and in-school programs across Louisiana. Electric Girls teaches girls between the ages of 5-14 basic electronics, advanced electronics, robotics, HTML, game design, animation, circuit building, soldering, and woodworking.
“Electric Girls’ mission is to increase girls’ confidence and engagement in science, technology, engineering, and math,” Serna says. “The purpose is to increase their confidence and give them skills, have them recognize their own confidence, and then be engaged in those areas by using those skills.”
Having experienced first-hand how male-centric and male-dominated the STEM programs were at Loyola, Serna and her co-workers gear their programs specifically toward educating girls in an encouraging environment.
“We are extremely intentional about how we teach,” Serna says. “I’d say the biggest highlight is that we focus on having a growth mindset. Have you heard of that? The whole thing is like growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. Basically, a fixed mindset is a mindset that thinks ‘I am good at writing, I am good at art, and I am bad at math. It’s just not who I am, and I don’t identify with it.’ Whereas a growth mindset is like, ‘I’m not good at math but I’m getting better—or I recognize that I could get better at math.’ Basically, that you know that you could get better. We focus a lot on growth mindset because we don’t want to make girls feel like they have to become masters by the end of Electric Girls, but that you do get better. We have structures built into programs like end-of-day shout-outs, badge ceremonies, where girls get badges and get recognized for them, and Demo Day, where girls present what they’ve done, to act as formal recognition structures of their progress and other skills. So, that’s very specific to girls as they learn in this environment. And I’d say—even more obvious than teaching with a growth mindset—is having an all-girls environment. That’s the most foundational level—it’s that you don’t have intimidation when you have an all-girls environment.”
Serna’s cat, Muncher, enters the room and jumps on the couch.
“Boys don’t need that sort of encouragement that girls need, because they, at a very young age, don’t face the same stereotypes and biases that girls do,” Serna says. “Their logos aren’t pink. Their logos are grey. You know what else is grey? Steel, bars, and metal. Things that actual engineers use are not pink.”
According to a survey on Electric Girls’ website, “3/4 girls report liking science more, 9/10 girls feel confident enough to teach someone what they learned,” and “100% of girls feel better about their tech skills” after attending one of their programs. Sponsored by companies such as Shell and Capital One, Electric Girls demonstrates its merit through the positive responses of its participants.
Toward the end of the interview, however, the conversation takes an unexpected turn.
“Am I a feminist?” Serna says. “Maybe not. What am I? Female empowering? I believe that women as a whole face issues that men don’t in some ways, but I also believe in the power of the individual. And I hate, hate, hate, hate things that are like, ‘I’m doing this for women.’ Like no, you’re doing that for yourself. And that's fine, but you’re doing it for yourself. My old roommate had a cup she used to drink out of. It just said, ‘male tears.’ I hate that shit. I hate it. Everybody likes to talk about toxic masculinity. When did the word ‘toxic’ come into it? What about it is toxic? Masculinity is awesome. It’s badass. It is. Everybody knows that. They just like to act like it’s just terrible because, I don’t know, like it’s bad and they fell into it. It’s a bunch of bullshit in my opinion. Masculinity is not inherently toxic. You’re an idiot if you think that.”
She sits upright. Her voice has grown louder. The nail clipper in her hand clicks rapidly. Then, Serna ends by criticizing social media feminist activism.
“Social media feminism is gross because it’s just so blind—like not really thinking,” Serna says. “I don’t know. It’s just like, what’s the point of anything that you guys are saying, you know? I think that there’s just a fine line between being an effective advocate and taking the easy road and just bashing people on social media to feel better about yourself. Just do some freaking introspection, and don’t worry about other people. Seriously. Just figure out where you are in your life, and figure out where you are in relation to other people’s lives, and recognize whatever level of privilege you have, or don’t have, and design your life and actions accordingly in a way that you find appropriate.”
