Graslie is a great example of this new species of STEM practitioners. She followed her mother’s advice, “Never let anyone make you feel as though you need to fulfill an alternate agenda if what you really want is an education.” Graslie parlayed her degree in art, passion for natural science, talent for writing, and experience in museums into a job of her own invention, the Field Museum of Chicago’s first-ever Chief Curiosity Correspondent.

When I asked her about her unusual path to STEM fame, Graslie noted that the evolution of her career makes perfect sense to her.

I'm a tactile learner. I need to hold something and examine it in my hands before I start to get an idea of what's going on. The observable information of something can inspire just as many questions as if you had read all about that same object in a book and never seen it in life. I can read about a meteorite falling from space and landing on our planet but until I hold that item in my hands and look at it I can't fully understand the gravity (no pun intended) of its significance.

Graslie rejects a staid and inflexible definition of science and the scope of the careers women can pursue in its study. In a conversation with Field Museum mammal preparer Anna Goldman, Graslie notes, “Science is a really intimidating word that some of us just need to get over, already. It’s almost a buzzword, [and] it seems to put restrictions on what naturally comes to humans, being curious.”

If our efforts to encourage women’s curiosity and passion for STEM succeed, we need to be prepared for the way female perspectives and approaches could expand the definition and scope of what it means to be STEM professionals. Because women have traditionally been excluded from these disciplines, and because their fresh eyes allow them to make connections between fields, many women are launching careers, and even entire industries, based on a flexible and creative definition of what it means to be a scientist, artist, or engineer. K-12 schools have done a particularly poor job of integrating study across STEM fields and encouraging creativity and interdisciplinary connections. We continue to teach science, technology, and math in isolation, as if they have little to do with one another. This sort of compartmentalized approach runs counter to what we know about effective learning: Students need to be able to connect content knowledge and concepts to real-world applications in order to develop mastery and passion for a subject.

Mary Flanagan’s career epitomizes just this sort of creative, interdisciplinary approach to STEM. She is the a professor in digital humanities at Dartmouth College and the founder of Tiltfactor, a conceptual game research lab that designs innovative board games and software that educate through play, explore issues of equity and social change, and challenge gender stereotypes.