Venture Girls: Raising Entrepreneurial Girls to be Tomorrow’s Leaders

In this impassioned cry for a concerted effort to recruit more girls to the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, Glangchai—herself a scientist and entrepreneur—makes a strong case for the urgency of her goal. According to one figure she cites, just 18% of young collegiate women are pursuing computer science degrees, down from 25% in the 1970s and ’80s. Her model for changing this state of affairs is entrepreneurship, which Glangchai teaches at her nonprofit, VentureLab. She lays out what she identifies as the basic skills of entrepreneurship, which include selecting a problem to focus on, brainstorming as many solutions as possible, conducting market research, building a prototype, and pitching to prospective users and inventors. Then she introduces a system for refining and iterating on products and ideas. Peppered throughout are thought-provoking “try this at home” exercises designed to encourage out-of-the-box thinking, such as a task involving Oreos, in which girls create a new cookie product, and “redesign me,” in which a girl is given a common household item and challenged to devise an entirely different use for it. This game-changing guide to empowering young women will inspire them and their parents. (May)