“Science: It’s a Girl Thing!” OMG, Seriously?! The Botched Video by the EU

Even more than in the U.S., women in Europe lag behind men in the sci­ence and engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sions, account­ing for bare­ly a third of sci­ence researchers. Under­stand­ably con­cerned about the gen­der gap, Euro­pean Union offi­cials launched a cam­paign tar­get­ing girls between the ages of 13 and 17. Their mes­sage: Sci­ence is cool. Girls can do it and make a dif­fer­ence in the world.

So far, so good. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the result­ing video “Sci­ence: It’s a Girl Thing” is about as on point as a Spice Girls video.

The first clue is the lip­stick i in Sci­ence. Three vamps are sil­hou­et­ted Charlie’s Angels-style as dance music puls­es away. A young man in glass­es gazes over his micro­scope in curios­i­ty as each girl toss­es her curls or shows her per­fect foot in a high heel.

Sci­ence? Yay! Let’s shop!

One hot babe does indeed take some time to write for­mu­las willy-nil­ly on some plex­i­glass while oth­ers gig­gle between shots of beakers, rouge and explod­ing eye shad­ow.

When my 13 year old daugh­ter watched the video, she thought it was an ad for a cos­met­ics com­pa­ny.

The Euro­pean Research, Inno­va­tion and Sci­ence Com­mis­sion­er Maire Geoghe­gan-Quinn defends the video as a way to “show girls and women that sci­ence does not just mean old men in white coats.” No, it means a young man in a white coat who seems to won­der what the three ditzy dames are doing in his lab. The video has gen­er­at­ed so much crit­i­cism that the E.U. has pulled it off the Sci­ence: It’s a Girl Thing web­site and replaced it with an inter­view with a young Pol­ish woman work­ing on her PhD in virol­o­gy.

This video is much bet­ter. But what’s with the sil­ly cut­aways to frozen yogurt?

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. Check out more of her work at .