Cards Against Humanity announced Monday that it will fund a full-ride scholarship for women pursuing degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. Applicants will be able to go for this cold, hard, collegiate cash, officially titled the Cards Against Humanity Science Ambassador Scholarship, for the fall 2016 academic year.
Where’s all this money coming from? CAH has a new Science Pack, an extension to the base set (you know, the one with a white card for “a windmill full of corpses”), which was released Monday morning and is available for $10 a pop.
Scholarship applications will be reviewed by a board of over 40 women, all of whom hold graduate degrees and careers in STEM, including professionals from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Adler Planetarium, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. One board member, Veronica Berns, attended high school with the CAH creators, and recently earned a Ph.D. in chemistry.
“They really were interested in finding a way to have a huge impact in someone’s life and to encourage women to pursue scientific and mathematical-type careers,” Berns said by phone of the CAH team. “That’s something they all really care about. Some of them are scientists themselves, like Josh [Dillon]. All of them are really passionate about education and providing education for people who are struggling.”
It’s really hard for one high school girl to fight back against years and years of men being dominant in a field.
“We as Americans have a history of not supporting women in scientific fields,” she said. “Even personally, I’ve felt it watching TV, like The Big Bang Theory, the portrayal of women is very inaccurate. It’s a show about nerdy guys and all the women are kind of ditzy.”
On a more personal level, “When I was in high school, I remember feeling like I shouldn’t raise my hand in class. I don’t know exactly where I came from. But if I knew the answer in math class, I had this internal panic of, ‘do I raise my hand? do I not raise my hand?’ And I’ve heard this sentiment echoed from other women, too.”
“When we have such a strong history of science and math as male-dominated fields, it’s really hard for one high school girl to fight back against years and years of men being dominant in a field,” Berns said.
While it might be easy to suggest that girls just get over whatever internal hand-raising hang-ups they have and go for science if it’s what they really want, Berns went on, it’s hard to imagine a future for yourself in a field where you don’t see anyone who looks like you. “People are forgetting that it’s still difficult to do. We don’t have an older generation of women to really support us along the way. We’re pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Even though there’s a lot more women now, it’s still not an easy path.”
This isn’t CAH’s first time at the charity-pack rodeo. They’ve previously collaborated with Netflix to do a House of Cards pack; they donated the $50,000 Netflix paid them to the Sunlight Foundation. CAH has also donated proceeds from the holiday packs to Wikimedia and Donors Choose. “We haven’t worked on anything we didn’t all think strongly was a good cause,” Dillon said by phone. “We think this effort is thematically appropriate.”
Charities are chosen based on the passions of the eight CAH writers, not the proclivities of the people who play the game, though Dillon “would guess that [the players] skew more liberal than conservative. But I’ve certainly heard of conservative people who like it, or like it in spite of a few jokes,” he said, laughing. “We have no claim to being unbiased.”
Dillion, who will defend his thesis on astrophysics at MIT in a few weeks, has seen firsthand how rare women are in the sciences. “It’s hard not to notice it. It’s obvious… And there’s no one answer to what causes this problem. So part of our rationale is, giving a scholarship to one or a few people is a good thing to do. It’s good for them individually and maybe it moves things a little bit on female representation. But helping just a few people get into science is not the goal in and of itself. The goal is to use our public platform.”
The winner will write an annual blog post (CAH will handle publishing) and possibly do other types of first-person storytelling and outreach through other blogs and videos, so “The women who the board picks are women who can explain their passion,” Dillon said, and CAH will “give them a platform to share these things and help them achieve visibility that they might not have, to get through the noise a little bit.”
Ultimately, Dillon said, the goal is “to help change the public perception of what a scientist looks like,” which is why the board is made up entirely of female scientists. “Even though it’s 2015, the public perception of scientist, if you ask a schoolkid to draw one, they’ll draw a white man in goggles and a lab coat.”
“That part of the scholarship is really important to me,” Berns said of the blog post. “It’s one thing to have more women in science, but they have to also be visible. Especially an undergraduate woman going to school, I think that’s going to make a big impact on other high school girls who can see her and what she’s studying and know that’s okay, that’s a great path you can choose.”
“People say there are fewer women interested [in STEM], and maybe that’s true today,” said Dillon. “But we should ask why. And the answer is probably that women at some point in their career are discouraged from pursuing the sciences. It seems far more likely than ‘women are just less talented.’… It’s clear there are a lot of other factors, big and small, that have decreased representation… We want to remove barriers that stop people with potential from realizing that potential.”
That’s why we have a board made up of women scientists: because we want to help change the public perception of what a scientist looks like.
Zach Weinersmith, writer of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal web comic, co-authored the pack with Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait. Attendees of a show Weinersmith organizes, the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses — or, as the kids say, BAH! Fest — which Weinersmith described by phone as “a kind of fake science seminar,” got a sneak-peek of the pack; it was a free giveaway at last year’s festival. (Weinersmith wasn’t paid for his work writing the cards, instead getting a bunch of free packs to use as BAH! Fest door prizes.)
“I’m kind of a dork about science funding policy, and one of the things that seemed to be the case was there’s a lot of talk about encouraging different groups to get into science, but there’s not a lot of money,” said Weinersmith. “My one big complaint with a lot of science outreach is there’s not always a lot of action on it. There’s a lot of talking, but a lot of times, we’re just talking to each other. In this case, there’s going to be a large amount of capital towards putting a person in the right position.”
Weinersmith and Plait wrote “a few hundred” card ideas that were whittled down to the 30 in the final pack. “We had a lot that were funny but didn’t work with the game well,” Weinersmith said. “We wanted to do a card that was ‘Richard Dawkin’s Twitter Feed,’ which is [only] funny to people who understand the context. And another we did end up using but in a changed form [was] ‘David Attenborough watching us mate,’ which is in there, and the one that we didn’t use was ‘David Attenborough narrating your first sexual encounter.’ We eliminated ones that were too dorky or too in-depth that people wouldn’t get.”
Making people laugh is a serious business. “I think what people don’t always realize is that all the white cards have to work well with the black cards and all the black cards have to work well with the white cards,” said Dillon. “You can’t just write science jokes that work well with other science jokes. We want people to be able to mix the deck and play with all of them. So a lot of what we did, because we had some of our own ideas — two of us are scientists ourselves — was figuring out how to put them all in the Cards Against Humanity format, to make the grammar of them work, and to distill down: this a really funny idea, what’s the core essence of this joke?”
The Science Ambassador Scholarship “is not a silver bullet,” Dillon said. “But there are things we have the opportunity to do well, and therefore, we should. We can get people excited about this. If we can change this perception a little bit, I think we’ll have done at least as much good as the scholarship in and of itself.”
“That’s optimistic,” he added. “But philanthropy is an optimistic field.”