You could have given me that money for real science, EU!

The whole day the internet has been shaking with lots of outrage over the EU’s video to attract girls to doing science. To be honest, I don’t really mind that these are young girls that aren’t even doing science while being observed by a guy. I don’t mind that they’re wearing skirts and heels and I don’t mind that the background is pink. I look like that sometimes and if it even persuades one girl that science is fun and for girls too, then that’s fine. I don’t think it will though, and what pisses me off about it is that the EU probably spent a whole bunch of money on this.

 

And last year I applied for a grant that was funded by the EU. This grant (for post-docs going abroad) had a pretty stable success rate of about 20%. However, last year all of a sudden there was a lot of talk about that year being the last year that they would fund this grant because of money shortage. And since you can only apply once, twice the amount of people applied than normally. And even though I scored within the top 20% I didn’t get the grant because they only had a set amount of money.

So instead of wasting that money on that video that pisses everybody off, you could have given me that money, EU! And I would have done real science with it. You could even have come and filmed me, and for some extra money I would wear heels, a skirt and even lipstick.