Britney Kirwan

Three College students from across the country are working with the Christian Dior Company and UNESCO to create an initiative program that introduces young women to STEM.

By Britney Kirwan

(Image: @knotjustcoding on Instagram)

There is an apparent gender disparity within the field of STEM that has not gone unnoticed.

According to the American Association of University Women, “Women make up only 28% of the workforce in science, technology, engineering, and math, and men vastly outnumber women majoring in most STEM fields in college.” (AAUW, 2023)

Despite these statistics, three college students have come up with a new initiative program called “KnotJustCoding” in order to change this gender disparity. So far, they have implemented workshops that involve creating friendship bracelets in order to introduce young girls to binary code

A fellow classmate, Layla Harrison is an advertising and philosophy major at Syracuse University and is one of the students working on this initiative. She talks about the creative process of creating “KnotJustCoding” and the ways in which they were able to make their business appealing to young women.

“We wanted to capitalize and market it on the pivotal female experience of making friendship bracelets. This way, we can show that art and tech don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” Harrison said.

Dior’s Women@Dior campaign has selected college students from around the world to come up with their own initiative programs since 2017. To explain Dior’s shift into philanthropic work that caters to young women, Helen Sotropa talks about Dior’s creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, who started the position in 2016.

“She really repositioned the brand to be very feminist. She is someone who completely embodies feminism and if you think of anyone in the industry that is more feminist than her, I don’t think you could find anyone else,” Sotropa said.

A fashion design major at Parsons School of Design, Sotropa works the creative directing, public relations, and social media aspects of “KnotJustCoding.”

She believes in the importance of creating a safe space for girls to be introduced to tech. From a young age, boys generally will appeal to things like video games which introduces them to tech and Legos which establishes an interest towards engineering and similar fields. But, what can be said for girls?

“Boys have their safe space for them, but for girls, when they enter a space like that it’s very hostile. So we decided that we were going to make a new environment where girls can just come together and learn,” said Sotropa.

With assistance from the Greater Ithaca Activities Center in downtown Ithaca, they have been able to create a safe space and run workshops with young girls who come from diverse backgrounds.

Jasmine Love, a senior at Cornell University who majors in fashion design, is the one who runs these in-person workshops. Since starting these workshops, there are now more plans about what will be incorporated next.

Love talks about teaching programs about 3-D printing and lessons on creating their own designs through a program called “Scratch,” which was developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From there, designs will be printed onto fabric, cut into strips to create bracelets, and they would then be introduced to generative art.

“When it comes to beadwork, it’s something that comes more easily for girls. They’ve been able to easily understand the steps of binary code when making the bracelets. The more that they organize their beads, the more that they love the process and they want to keep doing it,” Love said.

The Women@Dior campaign is just one example of how the fashion industry is continuing to evolve in ways that will continue to influence our world.

“I do think that being such a powerful fashion house with a lot of influence and reach, they have the ability to do a lot of good. This “good” can come from clothing they produce, people they are choosing to hire, and by supporting other people and their goals,” Love said.

Dior has been able to positively impact local communities and come up with innovative strategies to empower one another, changing the way we will see the fashion industry in the future.

Source List:

Layla Harrison – (346)459-7138

Helen Sotropa – (513)680-2079

Jasmine Love – (317)938-7755

Check out: knotjustcoding.com