The European Commission for Research and Innovation started an initiative on June 21st 2012 to get girls into scientific careers: “Science: It’s a girl thing!”
(See the link “questions about our videoclip?” for some background infos)
A video clip was produced by an ad agency for about 100.000 Euros. This clip was meant to raise interest in the age group of 9-13 year old females.
It worked exceptionally well as a viral campaign on what context markers not to use to create the context “Women as sciencists”.
With other words: The video – unintentionally – succeeded as discussion starter because it failed to use the right contextmarkers (whatever these are).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA[/youtube]
Stupid EU video PSA shows how *not* to promote science to young women
Again: Two approaches to initiate education, one obvious to inform and integrate; and one to question invisible medio-cultural givens.
Addendum (July 5th 2012):
On July 4th 2012 the german newspapers are all posting articles on the campaign. It had thus been highly successful as awareness-raiser. See e.g. this (google translated) article from “Die Tageszeitung” (taz): “Failure is Pink”
