(Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)īig idea : Black women entrepreneurs are founding game-changing start-ups in Africa and across the globe. She speaks at TEDWomen 2021: What Now? on Decemin Palm Springs, California. Aragon sees this organic network of writerly love as a blueprint for more formal learning tools to help develop students in schools and as an opportunity to foster connections across the country.Įntrepreneur Temie Giwa-Tubosun shares the hero’s journey she went on to start her company. An outpouring of creativity culminating in a kind, supportive community that’s generous with its feedback and constructive criticism in a way that encourages and emboldens. And what she and her research partner found surpassed her wildest imagination - over 60 billion words in more than 44 languages, written primarily by millions of young people over the past 20 years. As an adult, she decided to do a deep data dive into the vast world of online fanfiction to study the impact creating these stories has on the writer and their craft. Today, what Aragon wrote is known as fanfiction (or transformative fiction): a story based on characters or settings from another’s work. So she rewrote the story to her liking with reimagined protagonists and new scenes that reflected what she wanted to see. Why? When she was 10 years old, Cecilia Aragon fell in with the Lord of the Rings trilogy but was disappointed with the lack of female characters.
And, in a first-of-its-kind TED demo, Pilloton-Lam uses power tools to build a wood toolbox onstage … while giving her talk.īig idea: Fanfiction deserves a closer look for its creativity, criticism and community. To fight this, Girls Garage provides mentorship and education to train and inspire girls and gender-expansive youth to take their places in this industry. On top of the stereotype that women aren’t strong enough for the job (which, considering most of the work is done by power tools, is absurd), women and non-binary people face numerous other artificial barriers, including a work culture that is unwelcoming at best and hostile at worst. Considering these statistics, it’s a no-brainer that women represent a huge, untapped pool of labor resources. But unlike other fields, the gender wage gap in construction is a mere 99 cents to the dollar. How? According to Pilloton-Lam, there are more than 300,000 unfilled jobs in construction, and the industry is struggling to fill them. What will it take to actualize a future built (literally) by women as well as men?
Through her nonprofit Girls Garage, Emily Pilloton-Lam is teaching girls and non-binary kids (with a focus on people of color) the skills needed to take up this well-paid and satisfying vocation. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)Įmily Pilloton-Lam, builder, youth educatorīig idea : Our image of construction workers is overwhelmingly male - and for good reason, as only four percent of workers on construction sites are women. In a first-of-its-kind TED demo, youth educator Emily Pilloton-Lam uses power tools to build a wooden toolbox onstage … while giving her talk.