With 55,000 students, Ohio State is one of the largest land grant
universities in the country -- known more for its football and
basketball teams than its honors program, which nurtures young
people bent on succeeding in difficult areas of study, like the
sciences, math, technology and engineering. Comfortably buffered
geographically, Ohio State reflects the values and habits of
the majority of Americans not caught up in the jittery technological
mood swings of the coasts during those go-go years. I focused
on chronicling the next generation of young women as they trained
in fields that still attract and retain so few of them.
The film offers a rare longitudinal view of a group of young
women and their struggle to succeed. From 1998 to 2001, I
visited and filmed a remarkable group of undergraduate college
women at Ohio State over the course of their four undergraduate
years. We called our group "The Gender Chip Project,” and
it included women majoring in molecular biology, mathematics,
and the engineering fields.
The first question was how will these young women make it
through, and how are they different from other women in their
chosen fields who are now ten, twenty or thirty years older?
When I formed the Gender Chip Project community at OSU, over
the next four years the DV camera became a familiar instrument
in their encounters. I followed the students' busy campus
lives, brought them together for activities, and spoke with
them as much as possible in an attempt to both capture and
reflect on experiences that were changing as quickly as their
quarterly coursework.
The Gender Chip Project is structured in four chapters that
emulate the four years of an undergraduate's experience,
but which also echo trajectories that we all encounter repeatedly
throughout our lives: Glancing Back, Making Discoveries,
Seeing Connections, and Balancing Acts. The four parts may
also work as stand-alone segments that can be shown to younger
audiences with our accompanying discussion curriculum.
In June 2001, when the "GCPers" graduated with
relief, honors and a tremendous sense of accomplishment,
they had become impassioned members of a new generation imagining
and building their futures from the pioneering efforts of
their mothers, aunts, sisters and mentors.
The documentary opens up a dialogue about how women are
finding new ways to honor their own growth, motivations and
experience while imagining how to make the science and technology
workplace a comfortable environment for women to stay in
and influence for the better.
Visit The Gender Chip
Project website to learn more about the film, and find our downloadable Action
Toolkit, Curriculum and other materials to bring the issues
the film raises into your community, organization or classroom.
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