Course Recap

It has been a busy couple of weeks but I think I finally have all of my schoolwork done. Over the course of this class I have learned how to set up this blog, how to set up a news feed, how to communicate with the school librarians, and how to effectively conduct research from OSU’s library and Google Scholar.

I learned several theories on why there aren’t more women in STEM fields and read about ways to encourage women to join these fields starting at a young age. It was interesting doing research on a specific product, the Easy Bake Oven, and finding out some of the gender expectations of that toy. Each week presented insight into different tech fields and it was great that we incorporated gender into those discussions. Most recently I read about how venture capitalists invest much more money into men’s start-ups even though research indicates that diverse teams fail less often.

Finally the financial analysis was very helpful to me because my project involved my future education plans. I actually greatly enjoyed all aspects of this class and am very glad that I enrolled. I am not sure that I will continue using this blog but I will use concepts learned from this class, such as spreadsheets and research skills, in the future.

Gender Lens Update

I finally got my project written and onto my blog. There is still so much to do such as adding pictures and doing my bibliography. The biggest challenge has been finding studies about the Easy-Bake Oven. I really did not find any that actually use the oven as a main subject, but there are a few that mention it so I did my best.

I also did a fair amount of reading of non-scholarly material and found three recurring subjects regarding the Easy-Bake Oven. The first subject is a safety recall due to finger entrapment, the second is the 50th anniversary, and the third is that there was a young girl who started a petition to make the ovens more gender neutral. I have certainly learned to weed through the information available to find usable material.