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To me, it’s not about being a woman in STEM. It’s about Marina in STEM. It’s about Cassie in STEM. I think people are people and they do good work or bad work. Things are a little bit more complicated than just gender. There are a lot of inequalities, not just gender to deal with: socioeconomic diversity, educational opportunities children get, the kind of education their parents have, etc. Did you have to go to school to have lunch or did you go to school to be educated? These issues are a lot bigger than if you’re a woman or not a woman.

As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech,” I had the pleasure of interviewing Marina Umaschi Bers.

When Marina Umaschi Bers moved to the U.S. from Argentina in 1994, she had already been a journalist. In Boston, she studied educational technology at the MIT Media Laboratory, working under edtech pioneer Seymour Papert. These days, Bers wears many hats: she is professor and chair at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, serves as an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University, and heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies (DevTech) research group. Author of five books including Coding as a Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom, she is also the co-founder and chief scientist at KinderLab Robotics, Inc., maker of the KIBO robot, which she and her DevTech team developed with funding from the National Science Foundation.

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