“Badass Young Women and Passion Projects”
-Interview with Girls Robot Founder Lee Jin-joo
By Kang
Ye-won
Published
Aug. 2, 2017
Translated
by Kang Ye-won
※ Editor’s
note: This is an
interview series in which Korean millennials talk about their passion projects
for equality.
“What
can women do better in robotics?”
Dr.
Park Hye-won put this question to the audience at the conference “Girls in
Robotics”, which was held in December 2015.
“Women
could be better with humanoid robots that communicate with humans-?”
“Because
of women’s child-rearing experience, could they have an advantage with domestic
robots?”
People
in the audience muttered their answers with uncertainty as others just nodded
their heads.
“The
answer I was looking for is that the question itself is wrong. There is no
certain field where women are naturally superior to men, and vice versa.”
In
other words, when people say, “As more women join the robotics field, it
improves diversity”, the term “diversity” simply refers to more ways of
different individuals trying to solve problems, rather than who can do better
at what.
 |
From
JeongMee Yoon’s “The Pink & Blue Project (2005-ongoing) @
jeongmeeyoon.com/aw_pinkblue.htm
|
Although
that kind of stereotypical gendered thinking may sound outdated, it is still
commonplace, and easily seen in children’s toys. Photographer JeongMee Yoon’s “The
Pink & Blue Project” was first introduced 10 years ago, but gendered toys
are still rampant.
Girls
Robot is a social startup that attempts to change the path for youth and allow
them to find out what they’re good at and what they’re interested in without
the influence of social bias and pressure.
“Imagine
the field of science is outer space- there are so many stars, each all by
itself without knowing what to do or what it wants. That’s like women in
science. I wanted to have them come together like the Milky Way,” the founder
and CEO, Lee Jin-joo, wrote on its website.
Just by
looking at Jin-joo’s resume, it is not apparent that she is a sucker for robots.
Her fashion style (Girls Robot’s team shirts with a pink and purple logo, and a
colorful tutu skirt) emanates the “refreshing” energy of a robotics fan.
 |
| Lee Jin-joo, the founder of Girls Robot. © Girls Robot |
Jin-joo
excelled in science from a young age and enrolled at the Seoul Science
Specialized High School. In university, she majored in mechanical engineering
before changing her major to journalism. After graduation, she was hired by the
JoongAng Daily News organization and worked as a journalist. Later, after she
married and became the mother of two boys, she quit her job in Seoul and moved
to Jeju to become a full-time mom.
One
day, she was watching the news on TV and saw her high school classmate, Prof.
Park Il-woo of Kwangwoon University, making headlines as the “Father of Hubo.” He
was one of key researchers behind the team that created “Hubo”, a robot which
won the best rescue humanoid robot prize at the DARPA Robotics Challenge at
that time.
“I was
shocked to see the stark difference between my friend and I, and remembered the
time when we were studying side-by-side in high school. While he had moved
forward and began making robots, I was stuck behind as I had a family and
raised kids. So I secretly began my ‘otaku’ obsession with robots.”
Around
that time, coincidently, she was invited as the one and only woman robot expert
to speak at Kwangwoon University. When she was talking to the aspiring students
in the college robotics club, she had a eureka
moment, realizing that this was her calling in the field: to support more young
women in entering into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields and
possibly into robotics. Within six months, she had launched Girls Robot.
In the first two years, she spent her private
funds to promote the social startup, helping female university students in STEM
fields network with each other and start other clubs such as the “FC High
Heels” at KAIST and “Lady Bug,” a women programmers club.
“I
first met with a lot of STEM women students on college campuses. They had the
hunger for opportunities, so I only helped them with the ‘seeding’ and the rest
of the network just bloomed across the cities. And people from outside STEM
fields wanted to partner with us, too, so our network has grown even larger. We
now have a network of about 1,000 people.”
 |
| At the “2017 Science Parade Together” on April 22 in front of Sejong Cultural Center. Lee Se-ri is in the middle. © Girls Robot |
One
member of Girls Robot, Lee Se-ri, is just as much a robotics geek as Lee
Jin-joo is. Se-ri is a senior student at Kookmin University majoring in
mechanical systems engineering.
With
her denim overall shorts and brightly-colored bob with bangs, she has an
unusual look for a woman engineer, similar to Jin-joo’s. It must be the dress
code for the Girls Robot.
Se-ri
is the ultimate multi-tasker in the team, even writing articles and taking
photos for its social media accounts, Jin-joo proudly said during the
interview. “And she still finds the time to play in a band.”
Since
she was young, Se-ri’s favorite subject was physics. (“When I first learned Newton’s
second law, F=MA, it was so amazing that it seemed like the answer to any
problem!”) Upon joining a robot soccer club in college, she fell in love with
humanoid robots, enjoying every part of labor involving machines from soldering
to programming. Lately in her free time, she’s into making a non-toxic
menstrual cup using 3D printing.
The
Robo Cup (robocup.org) is an annual global
competition that first started in Japan in 1997. Its mission is to make a robot
soccer team that can beat a World Cup championship human team by 2050.
When Se-ri
enrolled in the mechanical engineering department at her university, she was
one of 20 women students in a class of 120. In the automotive engineering
major, there were only two women. And she was the first woman to join a robot
soccer club in the country, though a second female student eventually joined
her.
“There
are instances which make you uncomfortable just because you’re the only woman
in the group. For instance, the guys often play jokgu,
and because I’m not as fit as them, I find myself just cheering on the side or
taking photos of their game.”
When
the team members had to pull all-nighters before the Robo Cup games, guys would
share a bed in the lab, but Saeri felt too uncomfortable to join them so she
often missed out.
But
whenever her team won the competitions, it helped carry her through the
“lonely” times in the club.
“Most
recently, we had a competition in Brazil, and during free time we played soccer
a lot. Thanks to the professor who declared, ‘Same rules for boys and girls!’,
I was included in playing head-to-head with the guys. I loved it!”
Moving,
making, and sometimes breaking robots would be an “expensive” hobby for an
individual, Se-ri says, and so it requires more than just interest and
willpower. The two people that are most responsible for providing a conducive environment
and encouraging her passion are the professor who leads her robot soccer club,
and Lee Jin-joo.
 |
| At the “2017 Science
Parade Together” on April 22 in front of Sejong Cultural Center. © Girls Robot |
It was
a slightly bumpier road for Jin-joo in her journey of passion for robotics.
Jin-joo
first faced discrimination when she was at Seoul Science Specialized High
School. It was a top specialized school in which students were highly
competitive regardless of gender, but she noticed that only boys ran for the
class election and the girls were asked to be assistants or dancing cheerleaders
for them during the campaign.
Following the path of her father, who was an
engineer, she went to a university with a strong engineering department. At
that time, it was even rarer for women to major in STEM and the discrimination
was less subtle than now. One of Jin-joo’s teaching assistants made sexual advances to
her, and when she refused him, she was punished with unfair grades in the
class.
The
year that she was hired at JoongAng Daily News organization was the first ever in
which women outnumbered men among new hires, and older male employees would say
about this, half-jokingly, that “either women have become smarter or the status
of the journalism field has gone down”.
Now as
a 39-year-old woman in the startup business, Jin-joo is part of the only 10
percent of founders who are women. She has learned the hard way that inequality
is not just limited to the STEM fields and the glass ceiling is everywhere.
And
that’s where Girls Robot’s mission comes in. She aims to lift the number of
women in STEM up to 30 percent from the current 15 percent. In a broader sense,
she envisions a world where people can do what they are good at and like to do regardless
of their gender, age, sexual orientation, appearance, etc.
 |
| At Girls Robot’s booth for children at the “2017 Science Parade Together”. © Girls Robot |
Most
recently, Girls Robot is trying to promote the maker movement in Korea. Every
Friday, it hosts a “Girls Day”, inviting speakers and offering workshops. One
of the programs is called the “Pink Lab Attack,” in which the Girls Robot
members attack fab labs
across the major cities and give a makeover of their tools with pink colors and
decorations.
“To
break the stereotype that pink and machine tools don’t go together, we’re
showing the extreme of the femininity. This makes ideas in the middle ground easier
to accept.”
If, in
the past, women in STEM fields tried to hide or erase their femininity, Girls
Robot is trying to show that today’s feminist students are different, and that women
can do excellent research while wearing fishnet stockings and high heels.
Girls
Robot also offers workshops in which fathers and daughters can put together
robot kits or build things with Legos, as well as “Geek Girls”, in which young
women learn simple coding or soldering.
 |
| At a gender talk hosted by Dotface and Girls Robot, with presidential candidate Shim Sang-jung (center). © Girls Robot |
In
robotics, and especially when it comes to humanoids, which look and function
more and more like humans, today’s research areas are expanding beyond just
mechanical engineering and computer programming to humanities such as art,
ethics and philosophy. Artificial intelligence and cyborgs are no longer limited
to Hollywood movies but are becoming part of our everyday lives.
Last
year, people around the world were struck with both shock and amazement when
the world Go champion Lee Se-dol was crushed by Google DeepMind’s AI, AlphaGo.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, claims that bio-artificial intelligence (the
combination of machine and human intelligence) will be needed to prepare for
AI’s increasing superiority, and recently launched a startup called Neuralink, which
works on implantable brain-computer interfaces.
In the
social dialogue about digital humanities, technofeminism was born. For example,
Nature recently published an article about the artificial womb that grew
a baby sheep, causing a stir. If this technology later gets applied to human
babies, what are the social implications for women’s pregnancy and labor?
This
makes it clearer why the "diversity" that Girls Robot talks about –
that is, diversity of perspectives and experiences that go beyond the
dichotomous thinking and prejudices that put up divisions between the sciences
and the humanities, or between men and women, and the resulting sensibility –
is so important.
About
the Author: Kang Ye-won lives in Seoul. She used to work for a foreign news
agency, and is now the editor of PLATOON,
a magazine about underground art culture.
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