I wanted to 'disrupt the pink aisle'

As a student at Stanford, I was always bothered by how few women were in my mechanical engineering program. After I graduated, I made it my mission to tackle the gender gap in science, technology, math and engineering. I spent a year studying how girls learn best, researching gender differences, talking with neuroscientists and observing children's play patterns. I read books about the female brain, met with science and math elementary school teachers and nonprofit educators who were doing programs to get kids interested in STEM.

From my research, I developed GoldieBlox, a series of interactive books and construction toys to leverage girls' advanced verbal skills to help develop and build self confidence in their spatial skills. The star of the books is Goldie, a curious girl with a love of engineering. As she goes on adventures with her friends, she comes across problems that she must solve by building simple machines. As the story unfolds, the girls get to build what Goldie builds, developing the spatial and problem-solving skills that are fundamental to engineering.