The Language of the Future

Would you say that is the biggest part of your vision for the Girl Scouts, to make it more STEM oriented, to encourage more interest in the sciences and engineering and technology?

It isn't really STEM and here's why: because technology is rewriting the world around us and my vision is girls need, and women need to be part of creating the future and so you have to have the language of the future to be able to communicate and to create it. And so that's why I believe they need the tech skills because even today in fashion, it's a three trillion dollar industry that's being completely remade around technology. I was at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and they told me girls are dropping out of the school because they have to do light programming, but that's what you have to do now to interface with the technology that is recreating fashion.

And so I don't want somebody not to have their dreams, whatever it is, because they don't understand that. I don't want that to interrupt what their potential is in life. And then in addition to that, a lot of technology does not think about its effect on women, girls and children. I want to have women at the table who are thinking about what does this mean to my child, to my family, to my home? And when somebody said oh, we can't make that change because it would require reprogramming a sensor, I wanted to say reprogramming a sensor, I did that in middle school in Girl Scouts. It's not a big deal because we need to have the confidence, the capability, the understanding to be part of creating the future, and right now we're not. We're not nearly in the representation that we need to be in technology.