Building the STEM pipeline with the Girl Scouts

It’s a great time to be a Girl Scout.  And if you’re an Ericsson employee, it’s a great time to work WITH the Girl Scouts!

What is the STEM pipeline?

The STEM pipeline refers to the education, development and eventual recruitment of students from the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. It is a term which is widely used in the drive to increase representation of women in STEM industries, thus creating fairer opportunity and deeper diversity across ICT. At Ericsson, we use technology and the expertise of our employees to make a positive impact in the communities where we work, and since 2015, these efforts have been supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Globally, we have been working to improve the quality and access to education for nearly a decade and this includes improving opportunities for girls and women across the STEM pipeline. In North America, we’re partnering with the Girl Scouts to do just that.

How does Ericsson work with the Girl Scouts?

The Ericsson-Girl Scouts alliance is growing its impact and reach, and represents an unprecedented partnership focused on building tomorrow’s STEM leadership workforce today.  The Girl Scouts STEM Pledge aims to put 2.5 million girls into a progressive STEM pipeline by 2025—Ericsson intends to be the employer of choice for the incredible talent in that pipeline.  Our employee base is as passionate as they come when it comes to making game-changing contributions that advance the impact of technology in our society, especially through sponsorship, digital transformation, advocacy, and active volunteering. 

Not enough people realize that the central mission of the Girl Scouts is to nurture tomorrow’s diverse technology and scientific leadership by improving the depth and breadth of the STEM leadership pipeline. This goes far beyond its honored legacy of cookies, crafts, and campfires.  Worldwide, the Girl Scouts are the premier and proven leadership development organization for girls, preparing them to take their rightful place in leading and shaping an increasingly high-tech world.  This mission aligns intimately with Ericsson’s own quest to increase the diversity of our workforce, and to close the unacceptable gap that women, who are 50% of the population, hold less than 25% of STEM jobs nationally.  Tomorrow’s technology simply cannot be adequately-designed for the world, without having teams that truly represent the world.  The Girl Scouts are the expert in girls, and they rely on partners like Ericsson who are the experts in STEM to achieve this critical mission. By working with the Girl Scouts across Ericsson North American sites, employees can make a difference that is locally meaningful and nationally impactful. 

Ericsson is all about creating capability for our employees, customers, and stakeholders. It’s not just our profession, it’s our passion.  And that’s why we are so excited at what the growing Ericsson-Girl Scouts alliance can achieve.  Our approach to this and many of our social impact programs is to focus on the role of technology as a force for good and how we can create an ecosystem for sustainable and lasting change. We see partnership as a form of leadership, and this partnership is leading the way in generating value, impact, and change.

We’re going all in to support the Girl Scouts

The Ericsson-Girl Scouts Alliance funds in-kind active support between Ericsson and the Girl Scouts.  Here’s what that has looked like over the last few years:

• Networks:  Ericsson laid state-of-the-art fiber throughout the new, first-of-its-kind GSNETX STEM Center of Excellence at Camp Whispering Cedars in South Dallas, a 90+-acre living laboratory where STEM experiences for the girls are hands-on, immersive, and intensive.
• Digital Transformation: Ericsson’s digital onboarding platform Jumpstart is being co-developed into a multimedia and personalized digital assistant to help STEM volunteers get progressively more tech-savvy, anywhere and anytime; Ericsson is developing an Augmented Reality application, SPARK, to help girls explore the STEM Center of Excellence in an incredibly immersive new way.  Ericsson is leveraging Agile ways of work in rapidly prototyping and co-creating these new solutions with the Girl Scouts
• Internships: The best way to change the pipeline of tomorrow is to fill it today, by putting our incredible high school Girl Scouts to work at Ericsson as part of our tremendous internship program, growing significantly year over year.  These experiences make deep and lasting impressions on our interns, and they allow our interns to make deep impressions on Ericsson!  These internships are the very capstone of our alliance, ensuring that the progressive STEM pipeline is pointing strategically at our own future
• Volunteering: Ericsson employees hosted job-shadowing days, Networking and Etiquette experiences, the extraordinary Ericsson Technology Camp, field trips to our Ericsson Center of Excellence along with customer partners like AT&T, and so much more.  Sharing our incredible people-- their stories, examples, ideas, and talents—is the most powerful part of this partnership. At the Ericsson-powered Center of Excellence, girls are learning to code, build robots, scale cell towers and to protect their intellectual property. The intellectual property these girls create will change the shape of tomorrow’s world!

Our innovative and entrepreneurial approach to volunteering has driven continual and significant creative collaborations, with more volunteers from every Ericsson North America site engaging their local and respective Girl Scouts Councils in partnership.  The momentum is strong, and it’s growing every day. 

At Ericsson, our employees care. Maybe they can only afford a day to help or speak at a GS STEM event; maybe they have a few hours to let Girl Scouts shadow them at work to see what they can be; maybe they have contributions aside from their time to lend, like expertise, experience, consulting, training, and ideas. The Ericsson-Girl Scouts alliance needs and can use every kind of help, because there are so many ways for employees to get involved.  Our people have demonstrated incredible leadership capabilities through this partnership, where every shared success begins as a labor of love.

Ericsson is deeply invested in this partnership to light the way for girls in STEM.  Tomorrow’s STEM leadership starts today.  Are you in?

Continue the journey with us

Got a few more minutes? Read more about our partnership, as well as our other latest projects and initiatives, in the latest Ericsson Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility report.

You can also continue to follow the progress of our alliance with the Girl Scouts on the Ericsson Blog over the upcoming months.