Stop Fixing Girls—Start Fixing the System

We’ve made progress in encouraging girls to follow their talents instead of outdated stereotypes. But most efforts focus on changing girls—telling them to be more confident and to push harder. What about the world they’re pushing against? In the RE-WIRING project, we work on de-biasing career choice.

Girls don’t choose careers in a vacuum. Their environment nudges them toward certain paths—teachers grade with gendered expectations, parents hesitate to suggest tech or engineering, and schoolbooks still depict firefighters as men and nurses as women.

Even when girls enter male-dominated fields, they face industries shaped by masculinity, where sexism lingers. They encounter fewer role models and lower pay, they navigate cultures that reward aggression over collaboration, networking spaces that exclude them, and microaggressions that make them feel like outsiders.

The message is clear: girls don’t need to change—the system does. Telling them to work twice as hard in an unfair world isn’t empowerment; it’s an unfair burden. Instead of putting all the pressure on girls to break barriers, we should be tearing those barriers down.

In the RE-WIRING project, we work on de-biasing career choices while taking the whole decision ecosystem into account - including schools, materials, teachers, and parents.