She Maps was the first recipient of the Office of the Queensland Chief Entrepreneur's Adopt-a-Chief Program. The Cairns-based company has plans to put themselves on the map with their drone education program for girls.
Dr Karen Joyce, co-founder and the Education Director for the company, realised that she had a problem to solve in August 2016 when the National Science Week theme was drones. She was invited to a number of local schools - both primary and high schools - around Cairns to speak to students about drone technology.
Karen found while the children in primary school were enthusiastic, the opposite was true when attending a local high school. Alarmingly, not one girl showed up to the talk.
Karen began to wonder what happened to girls between Year 6, when they were excited and keen to learn, and the disinterest in the same technology once they transitioned to high school.
Doing her own research she found that as girls hit puberty they began to lose confidence in themselves, whereas boys of the same age became boisterous.
When presented with a stereotypically male-oriented activity boys jump in with gusto, while girls hold back.
Taking this information Karen decided to offer a girls-only drone day. Heading back to that same high school she suddenly found herself with a waiting list of 60 girls.
“Just by saying girls only, it’s incredible,” she says.
While she doesn’t ultimately believe in segregation she discovered a need to separate these opportunities. While she absolutely will work with boys, when she works with girls she wants them by themselves.
“It allows them the space to feel safe and comfortable in that learning environment. Hopefully it will give them the confidence later on to know they can work perfectly well in these types of fields, and they don’t need to hold back,” Karen says.
Karen also aims to change the way we think of science - she says it needs an image update.
Stepping away from the stereotypical lab coats and test tubes that rule people's perceptions of science, She Maps aims to diversify what people associate with science. For many people this perception turns them away from the industry when really they might just dislike one part of it.
Women in particular are underrepresented in science careers here in Australia and globally. By diversifying what people think of as science, they hope it will help girls in particular to realise they can be a part of it and be successful through it.
“Unless we have the ability to use 100% of our talent pool we are never going to progress as far as we need to in terms of the economy of the country,” Karen says. “We just want the best people - it doesn’t matter what race, colour, sex or religion they are. We need to help people realise they can be a part of this.”
Formally starting as She Maps in 2018 with her co-founder Paul Mead - who is also the Managing Director - they were fortunate enough to start a partnership with the Surveyors Trust. As a group the Surveyors Trust pool their survey plan royalties and reinvest that money into education and other types of programs.
This partnership has allowed She Maps to develop further online material for teachers and lets them provide all of their online materials to Queensland teachers completely free.
“I honestly believe that education should be free. But free means that somebody pays for it somewhere along the line - it’s just not the user. I would love to have everything we do free to the user but paid for by other community, industry or government organisations,” she says.
With a number of things on the horizon for She Maps they are especially honing in on their online programs. Having launched their online resources late 2018 the platform is building quite significantly. Most recently, they’ve launched their first drone mapping program, which is designed for industry and corporate - allowing these companies to use small drones to map the environment.
“We already have people from 30 different countries who have registered their interest in this program and this number is only growing,” Karen says.
